You should just stop after season four.

For the most part I enjoyed the series premiere of Guillermo del Toro's The Strain on FX. It's nothing mind blowing but it was a solid start. The casting is pretty good but a couple of the characters felt 2-dimensional especially the goth rock star guy. David Bradley was kind of badass as Professor Setrakian though. Visually everything looks pretty cool. The practical effects are solid, the CGI looks good and the gore is brutal. I'm excited about the rest of the season.

Tonight's Defiance wasn't as rewarding as last week's, but it was still a thrill. The Mayor became a little more interesting. He's still an awful weasel.

I also thought that the first episode of The Strain held potential. (I haven't read the comics.)
As did the first episode of low-budget Norse-God dramedy The Almighty Johnsons on Syfy via New Zealand.
As did the first episode of Extant.
I also went back and watched the first episode of NBC's Crossbones on Hulu, starring John Malkovich as the pirate Blackbeard. Think I'll stick with this one too.

Two episodes into Poehler's Welcome to Sweden on NBC and I'm enjoying that one as well.

HBO's True Blood remains horrible yet I still watch.

I enjoyed the first season of Deadbeat on Hulu and hope there will be another.

I saw the first four episodes of Spartacus: Vengeance on Starz a couple years ago and am now finishing up the season on DVDs from the local library. Such a great show. Good story, mostly solid acting, fantastic dialogue written in Latin grammar, lovely nudity, great CGI gore, and beautiful cinematography. It would probably look even better had I rented Blu-Rays from Netflix instead. I understand the Blu-Rays also have some extended episodes and commentary. I'll have to reactivate Netflix when when it's time to watch the final season.

I think Datak's story has been pretty interesting this season.


The preview for this looked funny.  I might have to check this out.


Oh Yes!

That's just my problem with the show's finale: this argument can be used to justify any plot hole, anything that makes no sense. It was the same thing with One More Day's infamous "it's magic, we don't have to explain it". Magical explanations are fine, if they are internally consistent; if not, they're like a "get out of jail free" Monopoly card.



I used Yahweh as an example of a God who uses genocide to further his agenda, but the argument holds for any kind of deity or any kind of important protagonist: they need some kind of motivation for their action. Or, alternatively, if they're really insane and act for no particular reason, the characters should at least mention the fact instead of acting like everything is wonderful and unfathomable. I understand that the characters were at the end of four intense seasons and probably more interested in getting some time off than engaging in theological discussions, but a little line or two on the subjects would have been appropriate.



True, they don't have to be omniscient. However, 6 had been made aware of God's plans regarding Hera, a plan that she started to teasingly reveal to Baltar. It seems extremely neglectful of the Cylon god to "forget" to mention that Hera would be temporarily thought dead, throwing 6 into a quasi depression. (At the time, I preferred the idea that 6 was, as had been suggested, a manifestation of Baltar's subconscious; although she was much more mature and composed that Baltar, she never seemed to actually know anything that he couldn't have reasoned himself. She just lacked his self-gratifying nature.)


Same here, since the finale is where I expected all unreasolved plot points to be brought to a conclusion, either a clear one or one left to interpretation. Kara being resurrected by a deity to accomplish some special mission would have been fine by me, but here it turned out her death and return served absolutely no purpose. Since she had lnown the Earth's coordinates since her childhood, there was no purpose to God killing her and bringing her back (apart for providing a surprisin' development mid-season); she might just as well has been kept alive.


That's true, and that's a neat thing that had been planned beforehand. But why was it necessary to wipe out almost all humanity to get Cylons and humans to interbreed? Why did the Colonials need to meet primitive Earthmen on their new Earth, instead of just repopulating this new planet and eventually breeding with Hera's descendants? How come there were Cylons 2000 years in the past while the first Cylons were built a few decades before the events of Galactica? Why did the cylon god destroy almost all of mankind and then save them by providing a new planet that (impossibly) had an ecosystem based on the same genes, just so mankind could go back, after 200 000 years, to exactly the same point as before? Those are all the questions that are raised by the finale, and unlike questions raised by a genuine mystery (where did the 2001 monolith come from? who are Jon Snow's real parents?) these ones don't seem to have an answer. The writers just play the "mysterious ways" card, which is less that satisfying to this viewer.

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Ah, well, if the cavemen at the end had been engineered by the Cylons, I would have thought it a great idea. (Congrats for thinking of it it, by the way, it's a pretty cool idea). The Cylons could have decided to rebuild a new humanity to make amends for the genocide, and while they were at it could have rebuilt an entire ecosystem. But that's not how the show presented it: the new Earth was a planet that just happened to be "compatible" (whatever that means) with the colonials and the Cylons, a planet apparently given by the cylon god so that humans and Cylons could be prosperous and leave many offspring. I much prefer your idea.

A few years ago I came up with a very fan-fictionish explanation for the cylon god's motivation, trying to fill the plot holes. It probably wasn't what the show's creators had in mind, but it did integrate these elements:
- God loves Kara
- She does lead mankind to its end
- All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again
- There were Cylons 2000 years ago
- Earth is covered with creatures with the same genetic background than the colonials
- The constellations that gave their names to the twelve colonies are apparently the same as seen from the thirtheenth colony callled Earth and the "new Earth" discovered at the end.
- The cyclon god does bizarre things at times and doesn't seem to be omniscient, even if he's pretty darn powerful.

Buuuuuuuut anyway... even if I didnt like the show's conclusion, it doesn't detract from the fact I very much enjoyed its whole four seasons minus thirty minutes. That's quite an achievement for a television show!

I heard rumours of a film version, too. I wonder what they'd do with it, and if it's possible to do as well as the show.