Without a doubt, some of Keith Olbermann’s schtick has gotten super tiring over the past few years (Jon Stewart does a great spot on killing of him), but this is powerful shit.
Warning: There might be some spoilerish material here.
I finally took the time to watch the pilot for Caprica, which is the pilot for the Battlestar Galactica prequel/spin-off. Overall, I liked it. Very different feel from the original show, but you definitely feel like you’re in that universe. There’s just a couple of things that I have to nitpick.
First off, Adama’s dad accidentally gets involved with the creation of the Cylons? That feels a bit forced to me, like the producers decided they needed to hit the fans really on the head that there are real ties to BSG and the future that awaits this universe. Okay, I suppose, but it seems sort of forced. Even though they don’t get too deeply into it in the other show, you might think Adama might have some memories about some of this stuff happening since he’s 11 years old in this show (making him 69 years old when the attack on the 12 colonies happens? Shit, Edward James Olmos was only 59 when they made the mini-series in 2003!). This sort of backwards retconning drives me nuts. Not as much as some of the fanboys, but nuts enough.
Secondly, and I’m sure this will develop more as we go along but it’s worth mentioning, do the Cylons evolve from the memories of a 16 year old girl? While I have to give RDM and company credit for how they explain the Cylon’s monotheism here, this seems a bit silly. Sure, it explains why the Number 1’s (Cavils) are so damn petulant, but still kind of silly overall. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one because they do have the whole series to evolve how this turns into the Cylons we know and love (and hate).
Overall, I’m pleased with the show and I think it will be worth my DVR’ing. Hopefully we can get deeper than two seasons before RDM effect kicks in and the show blows its load all over itself.
(Side note for the uninitiated, which would be all of you: RDM Effect is a theory I developed a while back on the old D6 blog that states that stuff that Ron D. Moore touches has a great buildup but climaxes way too early. It’s how I explained how they spent most of the second season of BSG building up this great tension about the Fleet elections and Baltar’s running for President and Roslin’s having all of these cancer induced visions about Baltar colluding with Caprica Six before the attacks and just when it should have crescendoed into something really awesome in the season finale, all they threw at us was that Roslin weakly tried to steal the election and then flash forward one year to Baltar as the drugged up President on New Caprica. No matter what RDM and co try to tell us about doing one of those Lost-like shifts in time to move the story along, they frakked up a good thing. It was good, but never as good, for the last two seasons, and I for one am glad it ended when it did. RDM effect in action, folks.)
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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Ah, Mr. Colbert. So very pithy of you.
By the time you read this, a whole heaping pile of ink and bytes will have been spilled about how we got to where we got in the Health Care Reform debate. A lot of the vitriol will be (rightly) directed at President Obama, whose strategy seems to have been to run and hide under the bed for fear of confrontation. Even more will be heaped on Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson for almost derailing the bill. I wanted to focus on something else.
Let’s be realistic. There wasn’t much chance that Joe Lieberman or Ben Nelson would have stood with a Republican filibuster for real. If they had, they would have been hanged alive in the Senate. It may be a genteel place, but I don’t think they would have avoided it. Instead, they understood how to read the tea leaves. Everyone knows that even when Olympia Snowe flirts with supporting the reform bill, the GOP’s ideological purity requirement would have every single Republican senator lined up to vote against every piece of the bill and every cloture motion. Therefore, it would only take one member of the Democratic caucus to defect to completely torpedo reform. Both Lieberman and Nelson seem to be pretty good at the one-upmanship game so they played it to their advantage. Lieberman gutted most of the really strong reform for the corporate overlords who rule his soul (seriously, the worst thing to happen to the Democratic party for the past forty years has been the sellout of a whole wing of it to the corporatists. Who needs Republicans when you have guys like these?). Nelson hid behind his abortion views but ended up punting on them anyway. His haul was the massive barrel of pork he got for his state. Have you seen what they gave him? In a nutshell, he’s putting the federal government on the hook for his state’s Medicaid costs resulting from the bill. Nicely played, Senator.
The loss here is that, as usual, liberal senators were not able to read the tea leaves themselves and get in the game early. Once it was obvious that the Republicans weren’t going to play ball and that the White House was more content to hide under the bed than provide any real leadership on this thing, action should have been taken immediately. We should have seen three or four liberal senators stand up and say (loudly) that they would filibuster any bill that did not contain a strong public option, Medicare +5 rates, and all the other stuff that would have actually, you know, reformed our health care. Even though compromise would have been required, holding steady on this threat probably would have let us come out of this thing with a strong bill. Instead, liberals took their seat on the sidelines and let the tea leaves float by, and this is what we’re left with: an opportunity wasted and the wrong people in the drivers seat.
If you have a chance during its limited run, I highly recommend seeing the latest Broadway revival of Hamlet with Jude Law. It is, without a doubt, one of the better Broadway performances of Shakespeare I’ve seen in a long time. Further to that, Jude Law plays the role magnificently. He really gets into the character. Just be prepared; the show is apparently unabridged and therefore over 3 hours long. Even so, you will be engrossed in every minute of the show. Go see it!
