bsg nears completion

Well I'm still pretty knackered, as might be expected.

Last night I finished what's been labelled as the fourth BSG series here in the UK. It isn't really - due to the writers strike a while back the full season 4 got split in half.

However, the box set did include Razor. Razor was kinda billed as a movie, but it isn't really - it's much more like an extended episode. It's not like the miniseries, which is multiple-episodes stuck together - this is like a proper feature length episode.

But it is very much an episode. There's a commentary track on it, which is nice, where they discuss the origins. It seems the intent was for it to be stand-alone, but I'm not sure it would really work as a stand-alone thing. You'd need to have some background knowledge of the new BSG to really follow along.

This is best evidenced by the fact that at the front it has a "previously on BSG" montage. If you need one of those, then you're not stand-alone.

Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the episode as I did, just it didn't quite do what it said on the tin.

The main part of Razor was about Pegasus - the other Battlestar that turned up during the show. The basic idea was it filled in some of the background for Pegasus and some of the gaps between episodes of the main BSG.

To some extent this was good, although if you've been watching the show, you do actually know quite a lot of it. They didn't really re-invent or modify the back-story that was presented in the main show. There were a couple of fascinating tweaks, though. Plus the newer stuff was all, er... new.

In terms of the first 10 eps they're definitely up to the usual high standard. The only thing I would say is that things and people really change. The bravery I mentioned before goes into over-drive: people we've come to depend on as being certain things get all flipped around and half the show gets turned on its head.

This is really good, but it does also mean you really have to pay attention.

Weekend plans are nothing spectacular - there's the new mags to scan and more website update stuff to be working on of course. I'm tempted to finish the last box of BSG stuff, though.

Obviously I'm curious to see how it ends, but I'm also kinda aware how much of my time it's absorbed in a very intense way - I've really been going at it hammer and tongs and other stuff has been suffering a bit if I'm honest.