Last night my husband and I were watching a new series on ABC called “Masters of Science Fiction”.  It’s hard loving science fiction so much, because the people who write it need to be as smart (preferably smarter) than you are–and Hollywood is not very obliging in that respect. 

The show starts with the discovery of an unidentifiable life form at the crash site of a helicopter in Iraq–potentially interesting right?  There’s all sorts of interesting things that could happen here.  None of them did.  Move to a government facility where they are examining the life form, bunch of stern looking dudes with lots of chest ribbons say they need to call back Captain so-and-so from retirement to deal with this, screen fades.  My husband says, “he’ll be fishing on a lake”.  Sure enough, cue completely hack scene of gruff military man weary of the world but with a good heart…..fishing at the side of a lake.  Hello…people?…screenwriters?  Yeah, have you ever seen Stargate SG-1?  Please.

We should have turned it off right there, but unfortunately we wasted another 40 minutes on a show about angel looking humanoids (presumably aliens although they DNA typed as humans sans gender of course, none of which was explained) basically telling us we better all just get along or else. 

There needs to be a specialist in Hollywood-a Science Fiction Cliche Master–who reads all these scripts and removes the cheesy crap (unless it works, but it’s a fine, fine line).  The brilliant series “Firefly” and “Farscape” get cancelled and this is what we get instead?  It’s a sad, sad time to be a television sci-fi fan.

A confession: I am a hard core science fiction fan.  Not hard core as in attends conferences dressed up (although scarily I can see the attraction), but hard core as in I read almost exclusively science fiction books and watch every decent science fiction movie and television series that comes out, and, like any good science fiction fan, now hate George Lucas for as I believe Harry Knowles put it, “raping my childhood”, with the production of the three crapfest prequels he put the Star Wars name on (now really, we all knew it was going down the crapper back in the 80s when the toy “cum-characters” of the Ewoks showed up, but I still had clung faintly to hope that was residual from “Empire”).  As a kid I watched the original Battlestar Galactica and in an eerily prescient action demonstrating why I would never have a prom date, I named my stuffed toy bear “Muffet” after the robotic dog in the show. 

Enter the new Battlestar Galactica now being made by the Sci Fi channel.  It started out very promising; a scene in the pilot episode showed an adorable little girl picking the petals off a daisy in the atrium of a large space ship.  Cut to space with a missile headed for the ship, then black screen.  I thought “ooohhh they have balls, they aren’t afraid to be dark, perhaps this is promising, and the characters are very good.  The show goes on, we watch every episode but I have this one, very serious problem when watching science fiction–I HATE IT WHEN THEY DON’T LOGICALLY EXPLAIN SHIT, even if they just make up a half lame explanation, if it has some sense and I like the show, I’ll be willing to suspend my disbelief.  So my main problem with Battlestar: They have never explained what the human Cylons are at all.  Believe me, if any half intelligent person was among the 45 K or so survivors, they would have cut that shit up in half a second to determine what they are; are they clones, are they cyborgs, WTF?  They can interbreed with humans (of course, this aspect of sexual exploitation is in an ingredient in EVERY sci fi show, at least they’ve moved on from anal probes).  So in this universe they have space travel but no electron microscopes, gel electrophoresis, or scalpels?  Hello!  And I don’t think there is much of a morality concern here: if some organism killed billions of humans you can sure as shit bet no one would think twice about taking it apart bit by bit to see what kind of threat they were dealing with.  All I’m asking for is some logical order, or some excuse why this logical order can’t be followed (a virus destroyed all our medical equipment, they have acid for blood etc…).  Sometimes I regret having 7 years of scientific training.  I think I would enjoy things a lot more if I wasn’t so anal.