I watched Farscape years ago when it was first aired, but I’m fairly positive I didn’t see all of the episodes. What I did see, I’ve completely forgotten, so I’m looking forward to watching it again. It should be interesting for another reason: I’m about halfway through season 8 of Stargate SG-1. Assuming I start Farscape shortly after I get it, I’ll soon be watching Ben Browder and Claudia Black switch back and forth between their Farscape and SG-1 roles. Whether mass confusion will ensue, we’ll see.

And, if you need a Battlestar Galactica fix before then, I may be able to hook you up. Apparently, SciFi did another set of webisodes, entitled The Face of the Enemy. It’s 10 short episodes (around 4 minutes each), starring Grace Park and Alessandro Juliani (er, that is, Felix Gaeta). You can watch them here. I’ve watched half of them so far, and they’re not too bad. Then again, it’s been months since a BSG fix, so I’m not sure how useful my opinion is. SciFi could probably dangle a model of the Galactica via fishing line in front of a black sheet with holes poked out for stars, and I’d cheer.

I quite enjoyed it, which was truthfully quite a surprise. After the first couple of prequels, I was not expecting Revenge of the Sith to amount to much. I was severely let down by The Phantom Menace – I thought it was just bad, all around. Jar Jar was awful, the kid playing Anakin couldn’t act, his mother giving him up, just like that, to go help the Jedi, the build-up of Darth Maul just for him to have one line of dialogue and then get lopped in half never to be seen again… I could go on like this for quite a while. I thought Lucas really dropped the ball with Episode 1. A few weeks ago I watched Attack of the Clones (also borrowed!), and thought that while it was better than The Phantom Menace, it still didn’t live up to the first three movies. Lots of cool effects, yes, but it still didn’t really grab me.

Revenge of the Sith did grab me, however. While some of the acting was still a little questionable – Hayden Christensen, I look to you, good sir – the movie was all around quite enjoyable. One aspect of it that I really liked were the hints at what was to come in the later movies in regards to ships¹ I loved seeing the Republic attack cruisers, which would later become the Imperial Star Destroyers; the ARC-170 starfighters which looked quite similar to the X-Wing. Seeing that stuff really made the whole thing feel more like the older films. I actually shouted with glee a few times when I caught such hints (I know, I’m a geek). One in particular that I remember? The TIE-fighter sound. It got a pretty big smile out of me.

I also thought the politics of the movie were pretty interesting. In particular, Chancellor Palpatine’s continued use of the emergency powers granted to him by the Senate (in Attack of the Clones) caught my eye. There’s been another Chancellor who gained similar power through legal means, except his name was Adolf; Hitler became more or less dictator of Germany via the Enabling Act of 1933. Apparently I’m not the only one to have noticed the similarity; it’s mentioned on the Attack of the Clones Wikipedia page.

Definitely glad I got around to watching it; for a while, I had pretty much abanonded Star Wars due to The Phantom Menace. One outstanding gripe with Revenge of the Sith, though: Yoda could have looked better. Revenge of the Sith came out three years after The Two Towers, and Gollum still looks more realistic. In most shots, I thought Yoda looked blatantly CGI-ish. Oh well – still a great movie.

(One last thing: if you’ve not seen the Star Wars Databank, do check it out. A Star Wars geek’s heaven.)

1. There’s a good chance there were such hints in the other two prequels, but I don’t remember them. That’s not saying much, though – the only ship-type I remember from The Phantom Menace is that sleek, banana-yellow thing from Naboo.

On returning to the series this time, I went ahead and started over with season 2, as I couldn’t remember much about the first episode, and the second episode was even hazier in my memory, despite the fact that I recognized the opening scene. Maybe I had started watching it and never finished it; who knows. I’ve now watched the first 7 episodes of season 2, and something peculiar has struck me: on the planets that have inhabitants… well, where is everyone? Whenever SG-1 goes to a planet that has humanoid inhabitants, generally, those inhabitants seem to number in the dozens or perhaps hundreds. The Nox had a huge ship hovering over their planet, which could have held thousands of inhabitants, but overall, it seems that most of the planets that SG-1 finds are relatively sparsely populated. In talking to my friend Joshua about it, I remarked, don’t these people ever reproduce? Shouldn’t their population increase, especially if they’ve been on the planet for a thousand years, which one would assume about, say, the Viking population on Cimmeria?

He said that perhaps the Goa’uld preferred to keep the people spread out on a planet in small village units to make controlling them easier. I suppose that could make sense with some of planets, but what about the Viking descendants in particular? Until SG-1 broke the protection device, the planet of Cimmeria was protected from Goa’uld by Thor’s Hammer. The Asgard seemed to obviously care about the people on the planet, and so I can’t see them controlling the population growth in any way. So, why is the population level still so low?

When you get down to it, I’d guess it’s simply a matter of money: they can only hire so many actors and actresses, and so the population depicted in each episode is rather small. However, what’s stopping them from using CGI to throw in some cities or large towns here and there? People are expensive, CGI is (relatively) cheap. Even just having a single panning shot of a CGI town or city would gift some realism to the episodes.

Somewhat related to the population issue: do the civilizations that SG-1 finds ever do any of the things that civilizations have to do to keep going? I don’t think I’ve seen any farms on any of the planets, for example. What are these people eating¹? I’ve seen setups where there was essentially a king or similar figure with his royal helpers, and then the slave population, but the slaves have, as far as I can recall, never been producing food. The planet P3R-636 and associated civilization, from the “Need” episode, is an example of what I’m talking about. Shyla the princess and her father control a slave population that seems to be largely used for mining naquadah, while Shyla, her father, and the other high class folks live “in the lap of luxury.” Okay, but who’s making all of that stuff? Who’s growing the food, raising the cows, sewing all of the flashy clothing, etc.?

Yes, yes, I know. I’m picky! I do wish the civilizations seemed a bit more realistic. Despite all of my nitpicks, however, it’s still a great show. I don’t think it’s as good as Battlestar Galactica, story-wise, but it’s still a lot of fun to watch. It also gives me geeky things to write about, as this post bears witness to.

1. If you recall my posts about Battlestar Galactica, you might think I’ve got some weird obsession about food in television shows. Not really. Food is just one of those essential things (duh), and so if, in a show, seemingly no one in a civilization is producing it, the civilization just seems flat and fake.

I remarked in that post that Battlestar Galactica was going to be gone until April of 2008, and luckily, we now found ourselves nearing April. Season 4 will start up on April 4th, a mere 25 days away. (When you’ve waited nearly a year, 25 days is nothing.) Truth be told, I’ve been looking forward to it coming back, but I haven’t been excited per se. What I needed, apparently, was to actually watch some Battlestar Galactica, even if it was an 8 minute recap of seasons 1 through 3.

The recap is currently here, but in case Scifi.com pulls it from the main BSG page or hides it in a nest of links, you can also watch it here. If you’ve not seen seasons 1 through 3, I really do recommend you watch them – they’re excellent – but if you’re strapped for time, the recap will at least get you ready for season 4. If you’ve watched all of the seasons thus far, the recap is a good refresher. It’s also got some pretty funny narration – “There’s a bun in the toaster.” Heh.

25 days… I think I can hold out that long.

In checking out the Razor website, I saw this at the bottom:

From October 5 through November 16, SCI FI whets Battlestar fans’ appetites every Friday night with “Razor” Flashbacks during all-new episodes of Flash Gordon. All the flashback clips will be available on SCIFI.COM immediately after broadcast.

Written by Michael Taylor and directed by Wayne Rose and Felix Alcala, these intense, roughly two-minute segments tell the story of young William “Husker” Adama’s rookie Viper mission during the first Cylon war. In addition to fighting for his very survival against relentless Cylon centurions, Adama makes a terrifying discovery that will come back 40 years later to threaten him, the crew of the Pegasus and the survival of the human race.

Well, that would have been nice to know back at the beginning of October. Then again, maybe it’s for the better; now I can watch all of the Flashback things back-to-back. Why, that’ll give me nearly 15 minutes of Battlestar Galactica! (I feel like a junkie saying that.)

If you’ve not seen the Flashbacks, check ‘em out; part 1 is here. A warning, however: don’t watch it at work! I just started to watch it at work, and was greeted with a sex scene. I guess I’ll have to wait until I get home this afternoon for my BSG fix. Figures.

The Mote in God’s Eye was written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the pair that wrote Lucifer’s Hammer. When I read Lucifer’s Hammer previously, I loved it. Later, I read Ringworld by Niven alone, and found it to be alright, but nothing spectacular. I tried following it up with Ringworld Engineers, but I ended up abandoning that one altogether. It just didn’t do much for me. I figured that I wouldn’t care much for further works by Niven alone, but might find collaborations enjoyable.

So, when I saw The Mote in God’s Eye at the library, written by both authors, I had my hopes up. I imagined a book written in the style of Lucifer’s Hammer, but set far in the future. And, to an extent, that’s what the book is. Plot-wise, the book is about humans in the distant future (3016) making first contact with an alien species. The species they encounter, which they call Moties, are quite different from humans, both physiologically and psychologically. The goal of the human expedition is to figure out as much as possible about the aliens. You can read the rest of the plot summary here if you’d like.

I ended up reading 400 of the 460 pages of the book before I gave up on it. Why? I’m not really sure, truth be told. I can’t pinpoint what it was about the book that turned me off. The writing was alright; the plot was an interesting one. Similar to Ringworld, there were too many instances of “science chatter” for my tastes (usually regarding how many Gs they were travelling at, spin in the ship, etc.), but they weren’t earth shattering. Whatever was wrong, I just couldn’t really stay interested in the book. It felt like it was going to take me the next 5 years to finish up the last 60 pages. The closer I got to the ending, the slower it dragged.

I read the plot summary at Wikipedia in full to know how the book ended, and I don’t think I missed much. Too bad I didn’t give up on it sooner and just read the plot summary, heh.

Next on my to read list: The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell.

Oh, by the way: even though I didn’t quite finish the book, considering I read 400 out of 460 pages, I am counting it towards my 52 books in 52 weeks thing. I spent too much time on it to not count it.

1969 – Neil Armstrong sets foot on Earth’s Moon.

1990 – Series of treaties between United States and Soviet Union creates the CoDiminium.

2008 – First successful interstellar drive tested. Alderson Drive perfected.

First interstellar drive in 2008? Afraid not, Larry and Jerry. We don’t even have hovercraft yet!

I’d honestly never really thought abht the feasibility of space colonization, though. I always assumed that while we’re not close to doing it yet, we’d eventually get to the point where we were capable of doing it. However, this fine essay by Charles Stross, a science fiction writer, has dashed my hopes terribly.

His main point is this: There are quite a few reasons space colonization is a bad idea. For one, we just don’t have the technology to do it. If we had absolutely amazing technology, on par with essentially a magic wand (as Charlie puts it), it would still take us decades to reach the nearest habitable planet. Assuming our kickass technology could then set up shop for us, after we’d poured vast amounts of money and energy into the project, what would we gain from it here on Earth? Not a whole hell of a lot. In fact, the new settlement wouldn’t affect us at all, other than having successfully been a huge money and time sink (not to mention a really long, boring ride through space for one astronaut).

He likened the idea of space colonization to that of colonizing the Arctic, or perhaps the Gobi Desert. Both the Arctic and the Gobi Desert are infinitely closer to us than any habitable planet, and yet we haven’t colonized in either place. Why? Because there’s no point. If we want resources from such areas, we send out a work crew who does their work for a long shift, then go home on leave. We don’t drag our family out onto the northern seas just because there’s an oil patch.

Reading Charlie’s essay was a real eye opener for me, particularly in regards to the sheer distances involved in space colonization (if we were to ever pull it off). If you’re interested in science fiction, science, astronomy – hell, even if you’re not – go read it. It’s worth your time.

It’s a pity we’ve not found a working Stargate. That’d turn his argument upside down.

So, here’s the question: am I going to keep watching the series? You bet. While a lot of season 1 struck me as cheesy, all in all, it was an enjoyable show. The final four episodes – Tin Man, There But For for The Grace of God, Politics, and Within The Serpent’s Lair – were great. A lot of season 1 suffered from episodes that were all self contained; there was no solid overarching plot. Sure, we knew the Goa’uld were “out there”, but many of the episodes simply consisted of SG-1 going to a planet, finding a problem, solving the problem, and coming back home. The last four episodes switched gears however, and got back into the Goa’uld plotline.

I read an interesting review of season 1 at amazon, which basically said this: season 1 wasn’t great. In fact, the bulk of the episodes could be considered mediocre. However, a lot of shows get off to a bumpy start, until they’ve introduced and established the main characters, and the makers have decided exactly where they’re taking the show. While season 1 of Stargate SG-1 wasn’t great, it was fair, and at least a lot of fun to watch. More importantly, it laid the foundation for following seasons to build on. I’m looking forward to watching those seasons.