As promised, here's my comment in response to the season premier episode of Alan Light's great fan podcast, The Combat Information Center, where I address some of the issues that Alan has with Season three of Battlestar Galactica, some of which I addressed briefly in a previous post. There were some issues with file encoding, so the comment didn't make it onto last week's show, but with any luck, it will be there this week.
As many of you are probably aware, President Bush signed into law this past Tuesday, October 17, 2006, the Military Commissions Act of 2006. While there are many things this act does that I find reprehensible (including authorizing torture and making a mockery of our most hallowed legal proceedings), perhaps the most dangerous is the revokation of the right of habeus corpus for anyone deemed an "unlawful enemy combatant", whether or not they are an American citizen.
The unfortunate part of this entire story is that the American people noted this tectonic shift in American political, legal, and cultural life with little more than a dismissive wave of their hand. Hopefully, as the reality of what this means for America as a whole becomes more widely known, we will gain the will and strength to undo the damage that has been done, that we will wake up from this nightmare before it is too late. I will leave you with another video from Countdown, one that I think makes my point better than I could hope to in so short a space.
I know I'm a little late to the game on this one, but I've wanted to post this ever since I watched it on 9/11. Keith Olberman seems to be emerging as one of the more cogent, consistent voices for sanity and justice in America today. I strongly encourage you to take a look and listen to what he has to say about where we find ourselves five years after that horrible day.
This past Friday, October 6, brought us the highly anticipated third season premiere of the Sci-Fi Channel (in the U.S.) original series, Battlestar Galactica. The two-hour event didn't disappoint; however, the great fan-produced Galactica podcast, The Combat Information Center did. I've been a regular listener to Alan's podcast since the very first episode in late season one, and, while he sometimes makes small errors in his commentary, whether in his account of events in an episode or in his interpretation of a given storyline or plot element, none come close to the whopper he gave us this week.
While he, too, enjoyed the episode overall, he took particular issue with the Kara/Leoben/Kacey storyline, particularly Kara's reaction to her child. I had three major problems with his assessment:
Alan claims that the scene during the "Previously on Battlestar Galactica" recap, where Leoben comes to Kara and Anders's tent never actually happened in the show. I beg to differ. It occurred at the very end of "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 2". I just downloaded the episode from iTunes on Thursday, so my wife could watch it.
Alan also takes issue with the existence of Kacey, claiming that it and, more broadly, the entire relationship between Kara and Leoben is a cop-out from the writers. I would tell Alan to go back and review his Season One DVDs, particularly "Flesh and Bone", the episode where Kara interrogates a captured Leoben. There are seeds of this relationship there, so much so that when Kara's ovary was removed in "The Farm", I thought, immediately, that Leoben would be the father of any cylon/human hybrid from her eggs would be fathered by Leoben.
I plan to put together an audio comment for Alan's show sometime this week, where I'll not only address the above concerns, but also his take on the Resistance's use of suicide bombings, the Cylon's torture of prisoners, and Lee's weight. If you want to hear what I have to say, either tune in to Alan's podcast or, if he chooses not to play my comments, I'll post them online after his show airs.
