Messages

All you need is a hammer and patience.
Barring that, there's these plug-like things that you can buy from DIY stores that you plug into the wall and this sends out a high-pitched sound locally that drives away small rodents.  Might work on moles, but I'd ask instore if this was the case.

Sackhoff's no age at all and seems to be typecast in that role already, as Bionic Woman viewers (both of them, presumably) can attest.

I think the idea to recast the character as a woman was because they wanted to have sexual tension between the main characters, but this confuses me, as there was a sexual subtext between Richard Hatch (Apollo) and Dirk Benedict (Starbuck) in the original show.  It wasn't exactly subtle, as Starbuck openly admits shortly before Apollo's wedding that he's jealous that a woman's entered the picture, so they didn't really need to recast the character in order to put a 'new' spin on the relationship - but if fans had trouble with a character changing gender, Christ knows what they'd have made of gay leads.  Personally speaking, I'm not convinced sci-fi is as tolerant and inclusive a genre as many fans would have us believe.

He's cross-eyed because (s)he likes it deep and hard.

Adventurer - it's a subjective opinion and to each their own.  As a regular sci-fi viewer, I've seen a lot better CGI work done on a weekly tv production schedule.  The BSG stuff is by no stretch the worst I've ever seen (that'd be a toss-up between Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Voyager), it's just 'not good' enough to be jarring for me.
Same with the verite-style dogfights - there's a time when the affectations get in the way of the story and work against it, and too much of the docu-trappings stretches the fourth wall.
Anyway - these are merely gripes, rather than criticisms.  There are only two serious criticisms I can level at the show.
1)  I could happily spend the rest of my life without hearing the made-up swearing they use, and
2)  Anyone who says the show wouldn't be better without a Daggett and its cold, dead, shark-like eyes is a filthy liar who will rot in hell while hot coals roast his belly and dogs feed upon his entrails.http://img262.imageshack.us/img262/7914/daggit4sp.png">

Pfft.  Do you know NOTHING about old Galactica?  The Lucifer models had to be effiminate because they were the bitches - the silvery and golden ones were the butches.  Relatively speaking, I imagine.
The 1970s Cylon version of porn must be rather dull.

Space-based CGI in BSG is good (although I could do with a bit less of the shaky-camera pseudo-verite stylising), it's just the badly-animated and composited Cylons that let the side down for me - especially in the episode where they boarded the Galactica.  They were overused in that (for my tastes) and it took me out of the episode.  If the entire military was built to fight Cylons, you'd think they'd have a few more of those explosive rounds laying around, too, rather than the oddly-ineffectual handguns they kept shooting.
Mind you, they are in a spaceship, so it's probably not a great idea to be giving armour-piercing bullets to any old Tom, Dick or Harry.

It was good fun to see the nods to the old show, but torture to see the "old" Cylons done in the same shitty CGI they do the new versions - which just look fake and plastic-like and kind of make me wonder why everyone's so afraid of them.  And why did the old Cyclons have such effeminate voices?  What was wrong with the old voice effects?  The makers are KILLING me here...

One thing that I don't really like about the new show is their over-reliance on flashbacks whenever they ran out of steam with the contemporary storylines (that boxing episode being the main offender), so I hope they aren't just trying to retcon in some more flashback material for season 4.
Might be a bit slow (and obviously will come across as rather self-involved) for people who haven't watched the actual show, so if you're planning on watching it with a non-BSG viewer, they won't think you, but regular viewers will probably like seeing some blanks filled-in (what happened to Pegasus' first XO and their civilian convoy).

Still no creepy robot monkey dog hybrids, I'm afraid to say.  Can't have everything, I suppose.

Who isn't marketed as a hard science show, it's marketed and hyped out the arsehole as undemanding event tv - emo fluff for children and Hollyoaks viewers.  It really isn't any more polished or impressive a production than something like Farscape - except Farscape wasn't made in Britain, so it's automatically inferior to Who...

I think it's fine to watch something you hope will at least be enjoyable fluff, feel cheated, and then bitch about it afterwards, but it's best to keep it all in perspective and not feel the need to form a lynchmob because of it.
If that fails, better for the blood-pressure to just remember that every individual experience is a subjective one.  You might know with absolute certainty that something is the biggest pile of shite in the world and you can't believe rational people can't see it, but don't begrudge them their enjoyment of it.  Who comes on after that dancing thing, after all, which I think is apt - mainly because I look at it and think it's harmless and undemanding and people like it, but its popularity is slightly bewildering.

Although I will say the viewing figures argument is a false one in terms of dissecting the quality of Who - Eastenders and Coronation Street are the most popular tv programmes in Britain, Titanic the most popular film of all time, Bryan Adams' 'Everything I Do' the most popular song of all time, Labour the political party of preference...

"a fucking roomful of paid writers"

At this point, Jim, you forgot to add the words "handed money from the defacto tax the general public has to pay whether they like it or not" to this sentence.  Apart from being a valid point in and of itself, it also brings to the foreground that RTD can be as precious as he wants about the minority of 'whining ninnies on the internet', but their (our?) criticisms are nonetheless valid if only because we pay for this ego-trip of his, and we should have a say in how millions of quid of our cash is spent, especially if - as you point out - none of the writers can spare less than two minutes to fix a plot hole a five year-old child can spot.

All I could think of was the spookily accurate Extras scene where the Doctor cries "He's hyperpodulating!" while Ricky Gervaise looks at the camera with undisguised contempt for the audience.  Spot-on, Ricky.

The Doctor also said "Hello, Sailor!" at one point.  Make of that what you will.

Jesus Christ.
There could be lengthy examinations of why this was a load of old crap, but I think it's taken enough of my bloody christmas already.  I do hope someone enjoyed it, though - they've already paid for it thanks to the unique way in which the BBC is funded (dated but relevant quote).

Merry christmas, all!

Just think - everyone hated Bros because they thought "pop music can't get any worse than this!"

I like Gervaise more now that he's famous than when he was up-and-coming, as observing the levels of bitterness his success engenders in certain quarters is highly amusing - The Sun is almost worth buying for the tv column alone when they lay into Gervaise on the flimsiest of (sometimes convoluted and contradictory) pretexts.

The Extras special was more layered than it's credited as being, with the cumulative Big Brother speech telling the viewer all they need to know about what's gone before, as 'Andy' admits he's a fame-seeking whore and ultimately worse than what he criticises, since he pretends he knows better about the things he both observes and actively participates in.
More emo than funny, but still funny.

Penguins are good if you bite the opposite corners off and use them as a straw.
Rocky bars are good, too.

It's nice to be nice.

"Buffy = best programme ever. It's a pretty girl kung-fu kicking vampires with snappy one one-liners: if you can't get funding for a show with that premise, you're dead."

Whedon couldn't get funding for it for over seven years - hence the huge gap between the film and the tv show.  In the end, it only got made because Xena: Warrior Princess was a runaway success at the time and the studio wanted something with a female lead.  No preferences for setting, castmembers, demographics or what have you, just something - ANYthing - with a female lead character.

Rather amusingly, all the stuff that Xena did in its run has been appropriated by Buffy fandom - lesbian subtext, musical episodes, the first female TV action hero to go mainstream (though Wonder Woman or Bionic Woman could be argued to be the forerunners here), killing the main character in a season finale - all Buffy's doing, apparantly.

New Who.  Not terrible, but more pretentious than New Battlestar Galactica, which takes some doing (although if the rumoured metafictional finale for BSG ever comes to pass, this opinion may change).  The excitable mainstream fandom of the show is a bit distracting, too.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The first couple of seasons were a bit of harmless fun with the whole mish-mash of classic horror and fantasy ideas like the fishmen and the evil ventriloquist's dummy, but around the time they introduced Faith, it all went a bit arsebound and in-jokey.  Oh Angel's dead?  Oh he's back now - I'm sure they'll explain that in a minute.  No?  Oh okay, I'm sure they'll explain it in the next few seasons.  Oh he's got his own show now?  (looks at watch)  Cancelled?  Oh well.

Gangsters as an entertainment meme.  I don't mind stories with a clear endgame (Ray Liotta's character in Goodfellas ending up an anonymous nobody after looking down on such people all his life, or Joe Pesci's character a victim of the casual and arbitrary violence he made a habit and reputation of dispensing), but more often than not they're just dangled as some sort of power fantasy before the reader/viewer and we're expected to take some kind of thrill from their excesses and lack of morality.  That's fine for slasher movies with men in hockey masks who are clearly supposed to be ludicrous monsters, but I always get the feeling that gangsters are supposed to be admired in popular culture, like some kind of modern outlaw, rather than scum with a union.

Badly-dubbed anime shows of over three hundred episodes with truculent and unlikeable spiky-haired main characters (Pokemon, Digimon, Dragonball, Naruto, One Piece, Bleach).
I can't even quantify why I don't like these.  They just seem endless and without meaning to me, so I must be missing something.
While we're in anime town - Akira.  Dull, overlong and devoid of any charm at all.  I never understood why it holds such affection in the hearts of many - I used to think it was because it was the most visible vanguard of anime crossing into mainstream western consciousness, but the (Manga Entertainment) translation at that time was an insult to the viewer.  The current dub is a lot better, but still dull as ditchwater.

Hollyoaks.  Chicks seem to be mental for this show, but I'm lost - it doesn't even pretend to be a soap opera anymore, and the opening credits consist of waving male and female models at the camera.  I'm convinced it has to be some sort of postmodern enterprise on the part of C4 attempting to deconstruct modern television down to the barest necessary componants to make young adults watch a show - 'good-looking people walking around, and maybe they do stuff, maybe they don't'.  the show's not even terrible - it just *is*.