More On The Resistance

It's funny, when I blogged last on SciFi.com's Battlestar webisodes I complained about how hard it was to find anything about them. Now if you just go right to www.scifi.com, they're a bit hard to miss. They greet you even before their start page.

As Thomas has pointed out, it's an odd format. At first I thought it would be a normal episode just split into 2-3 minute chunks. Of course, that doesn't really work out. When you watch a normal television show, scenes are spread out unevenly with length proportional to their weight in a plot. So you might have a long scene at the beginning of the show to set the stage, several smaller scenes to carry that action and a long scene towards the end to finish the story.

Instead, The Resistance are small vignettes which aren't entirely connected (OK, that might not be fair after watching only two episodes) but stand to make a rather singular point. It's not unlike a soap opera, actually, which generally has subplots all given similar sized scenes with a few actors. I hate soap operas, but The Resistance doesn't feel like it's forming into one. There's clearly a central theme and plot arising. The writing feels like it's done with the same pen as the normal show, it's just served up in smaller chunks. The acting and characters feel like what avid viewers will have grown used to and not simply phoned in advertisments. If you can feel anything out of sorts - it's that these episodes were clearly shot under a tight budget. Cylon occupied New Caprica, for instance, is suspiciously devoid of Cylons.

Or to put it simply - it's an odd format but the producers are clearly trying to make it work and taking seriously. It's not going to be anywhere nearly as entertaining as the premiere ... but it will serve as an appetizer until we get Season Three.

If I have a complaint ... it's that I'm watching this in this small embedded flash viewer. I've gotten spoiled in the last few weeks. On the computer, I like to watch things full screen with a minimum amount of trouble. It can be low-res, but squinting into a flash player just adds to the already low budget feel. The only reason I could think that they wouldn't publish these on iTunes at the same resolution as every other television show is to drive traffic to scifi.com.

And I've been in those kinds of meetings where those kinds of decisions are made. The traffic never works out the way people want and sometimes it's just better to thinks of the audience first.




tagged: television, battlestar