Tag Archives: Someone to Watch Over Me

The McNuttCast: Episode One – “Battlestar Galactica”

mcnuttcastlogoConsidering how much time and energy I’ve devoted to Battlestar Galactica, one would think that I would have spent all of this week preparing an epic list of episodes, plus some final thoughts before the show’s series finale this evening. However, I realized at a certain point that I couldn’t do it: there was too much to say, too much that I’d end up repeating in tonight’s review of the finale itself. If I was going to discuss or engage with the series, I had to diversify.

As a result, after many requests and much rumination, my brother Ryan (from McNutt Against the Music) and I collaborated on the very first, and special, edition of The McNuttCast, a half-hour discussion about popular culture, including television, movies, music and video games.

In this episode focused solely on Battlestar Galactica, we discuss everything ranging from favourite episodes and characters to the pacing concerns in Season Four and our hopes for tonight’s finale. We discuss some big questions, including at what point the series first struck us as something genuinely unique, and also some smaller things along the way.

When The McNuttCast moves to its normal structure, it’ll be a bit more of a departure for me and the blog – rather than replacing any existing blog content, it’s rather there to add a little bit of diversity. While I’ll be leading the way on television, and the Elder McNutt has the music beat, we’re pretty even on movies and video games, so it will be interesting to see how I adapt to suddenly discussing those topics on a regular basis in a critical framework beyond Twitter. There’s more information about our goals and our future structure in the first episode.

In the meantime, though, it’s all Battlestar all the time – in our 30-minute structure (this one runs a bit longer) we don’t have room (or the free time) to delve into every single episode, so feel free to let us know which ones we forgot, or which ones we were remiss in including. And, of course, come back in the wee hours this evening for my full, likely thesis-length review, of the second part of “Daybreak.”

So say we all!

McNuttCast: Episode One – “Battlestar Galactica”

Download the MP3 (36:20)

NOTE: You can find chapter breaks in the list below – we’re currently working on getting the Subscription side of things together, as this was a bit of a last minute launch (and the Elder is currently on a plane on his way to Saskatchewan of all places). When we get things finalized, we’ll be sure to update accordingly.

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Battlestar Galactica – “Someone to Watch Over Me”

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“Someone to Watch Over Me”

February 27th, 2009

For an episode driven by the power of melody to transcend minds and to bring people together, there was a return to a familiar rhythm to “Someone to Watch Over Me,” a return to form for Battlestar Galactica as it heads into its final three episodes. What’s been missing in the last few episodes is the sense that this is all coming together to add up to something, that what we’ve been seeing and the answers we’ve been searching for have been worth our time. While, perhaps, the content of “No Exit” or “Deadlock” will make a difference in the end, neither episode in and of itself added up to something profound, something progressive, or something that gives us some peace of mind that the show knows where its most powerful material lies as it heads towards its finale.

But this week this all changed under the guidance of Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, delivering their last episode with a deft sense of pacing and momentum. It is an episode that leans heavily on the past to demonstrate the power that it has over us, and then allows that to play out in the present in a way that is simultaneously revelatory and, more importantly, diversionary from the laidback, almost nonchalant path the show has been on since the end of the mutiny. The result is a clear path to the future, centering its storyline on the two major unanswered questions and using both of them to drive us into something approximating a climax. More importantly, though, the actions in the episode are ones which actually have broad implications for almost everyone: while the most recent drama has remained far too isolated to one side of humans and Cylons, here we finally have something that everyone can get really frakking pissed about.

And, well – finally.

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