GEORGE RR MARTIN BASHES LOST, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, AND BABYLON 5

I think he's relatively fair with both Lost and BSG, and even a little more laudatory than I would have expected. The real coup for this article was the amazing Pete's Dragon revelation.

I'm the opposite with Battlestar Galactica. Loved the first two seasons, found the show getting increasingly flabby in the second half of its run but I ended up really loving the finale and what it represented. 

Martin's just stating an opinion that a fair number of other folks held regarding Lost's ending. I disagree, but I understand his POV.

Game of Thrones isn't really comparable to that show, though. He won't have to worry about "pulling a Lost" because GoT is a fundamentally different type/form of narrative - nevermind the fact that HBO's approach to production is 180 degrees away from the approach of network television.

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Originally Posted by Jesse Custer 

 

 

Game of Thrones isn't really comparable to that show, though. He won't have to worry about "pulling a Lost" because GoT is a fundamentally different type/form of narrative - nevermind the fact that HBO's approach to production is 180 degrees away from the approach of network television.

 

 

This. HIs books are very, very different from LOST; I think the only way he could muck it up is with a Disneyfied, happily ever after ending. Which we all know ain't coming.

My main reaction, though, is STFU and keep writing. Anyone who lets 6 years (!) go between books - especially genre books like these, which aren't, let's admit, Pynchon-level of literature - has no business yapping off about other people who have gall to actually FINISH their stories.

Finish the damn book, George. And then we'll be glad to listen to you tell us how every other genre series should have ended.

Most of his comments are pretty fair. On the BSG and Babylon 5 comparison I tend to side with his friend, in that I think B5 as a whole was much better planned and executed, and satisfying as a whole package. But I also agree with Martin that the greatest BSG episodes beat the best of B5 in both number and quality.

THRONES is also safe in the sense that it isn't HIS show. He's mostly inviting just people to rip on his books.

I dunno. My feelings for BSG vs LOST aside, his explanation for why the ending to BSG is not satisfactory lacks any real argument. He basically says he didn't like it and that there probably could never be an ending that he'd like. Which makes sense on one level even if it lacks specifics. His breakdown of LOST seems to be a lot more substantive. On a side note, I'm not sure there's any argument that can get me to watch Babylon 5.

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Originally Posted by Pop Zeus 

On a side note, I'm not sure there's any argument that can get me to watch Babylon 5.

I think with Babylon 5 you kind of had to be there. Because at the time it's serialised, meta-narrative heavy, style was unique. It's really, really, clumsy in how it handles a lot of things and pound for pound it's got the fewest genuinely great episodes of any TV show which it gets paired against. 
 

Pretty sure his comments from the New Yorker about "pulling a Lost" were in regards to finishing the book series - not the television series.  He's just worried about maintaining continuity and crafting an ending to the series that isn't a huge let-down to most of it's fans.

I wasn't very keen on BSG's ending (though I love the show), and hated Lost's (though I like the show), but I still think it's unfair to call blowing the ending "pulling a Lost".  Any fantasy fan knows the term should be "Wolving The Calla".

Babylon 5 has always been underrated on this forum. It's flaws are pretty obvious and there's a fair amount you need to be willing to forgive - weak bookending seasons, some dodgy production values, disappears up it's own arse occasionally etc. It suffers from being 'of its time' a lot more than most of the big 00's shows will I expect.

But it's still the best example of a show built around a complex and internally consistent 'mythology' and pre-planned story and character arcs. They used the fact the big picture was mostly finished from the start to foreshadow later events, to tease you with mysteries and then to eventually provide satisfying payoffs for all these things. BSG and apparently Lost as well tried to do this, but failed thanks to the bigger picture not being properly thought out and the answers being written to fit the questions rather than the other way around.

The Lampie ensemble comparison is marvelous. That is all.

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Originally Posted by Paul C 

Babylon 5 has always been underrated on this forum. It's flaws are pretty obvious and there's a fair amount you need to be willing to forgive - weak bookending seasons, some dodgy production values, disappears up it's own arse occasionally etc. It suffers from being 'of its time' a lot more than most of the big 00's shows will I expect.

 

But it's still the best example of a show built around a complex and internally consistent 'mythology' and pre-planned story and character arcs. They used the fact the big picture was mostly finished from the start to foreshadow later events, to tease you with mysteries and then to eventually provide satisfying payoffs for all these things. BSG and apparently Lost as well tried to do this, but failed thanks to the bigger picture not being properly thought out and the answers being written to fit the questions rather than the other way around.

The problem is that despite how great the 'big picture' was Babylon 5 never really felt like it had a brilliant stand alone episode. It didn't have a 'Walkabout' or '33' which transcended or defined the show. Every great moment of Babylon 5 was simply a crest of the overall season. 

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Originally Posted by Schwartz 

I wasn't very keen on BSG's ending (though I love the show), and hated Lost's (though I like the show), but I still think it's unfair to call blowing the ending "pulling a Lost".  Any fantasy fan knows the term should be "Wolving The Calla".

Well done.

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Originally Posted by Schwartz 

I wasn't very keen on BSG's ending (though I love the show), and hated Lost's (though I like the show), but I still think it's unfair to call blowing the ending "pulling a Lost".  Any fantasy fan knows the term should be "Wolving The Calla".

I dunno. I feel LOST's ending is worse for me for the simple reason that any show can go downhill or have a dramatically unsatisfying resolution, but Lost's was the creators all but going "Hey we had no idea what the fuck we were doing!"

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Originally Posted by Spike Marshall 
The problem is that despite how great the 'big picture' was Babylon 5 never really felt like it had a brilliant stand alone episode. It didn't have a 'Walkabout' or '33' which transcended or defined the show. Every great moment of Babylon 5 was simply a crest of the overall season. 

To an extent that's true, but so what? The show was at its best when it was in full-blown serial storytelling mode and every episode was a piece in the puzzle, that was its biggest strength. It rarely produced mindblowing episodes like BSG could knock out but there were plenty of peaks in there.

Incidentally at least one great stand alone episode comes to mind - the 'anthology' one that keeps jumping forwards in time to show you how things went centuries after the end of the show.

He's right. The Lost write-ups on CHUD were a hundred times more interesting than what the show actually pooped out. Fan of BSG, but yes, the ending there was a bit poopy too. 

I sound so adult in this post.

Not to turn this into entirely a LOST thread again but...

As someone who actually DID re-watch the entirety of Lost specifically looking for little hints as to the big picture (specifically Jacob and the MiB), I can tell you that, while there are things here and there that can be interpreted as such ("Oh, I guess the Smoke Monster took the form of Walt in order to trick Shannon into getting into Ana-Lucia's line of fire...or something.") nothing is very concrete. 

I do absolutely agree with Martin though that the characters on Lost were the best things about it. No matter how bad the show seemed to get, I LIKED these people (Sawyer especially had the arc that kept on...well...arcing.) I wouldn't trade watching that show for anything in the world. 

As for BSG, I had the advantage of watching it after it ended and expecting the worst from all the talk. What I got instead was a pleasant surprise. (Though, and this is completely off topic, but did anyone else chuckle when Adama went "Anyone who wants to stand and fight with us, cross this line. Oh, no, not you Dr. Cottle, go, get back over there. C'mon.") 

All of this is to say, I hope Game of Thrones turns out as good as I hope. Loved the pilot. 

"Wolving the Calla" needs to be a meme.  

I'm curious what Martin's thoughts are on Harry Potter and how that stuck the landing.  

The folks who made BSG should be pretty happy Douglas Adams was in the grave for several years before they pulled that shit.

As for Martin, well, he makes some good points but he should probably work at improving his prose before taking shots at others.

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Originally Posted by Evi 

I dunno. I feel LOST's ending is worse for me for the simple reason that any show can go downhill or have a dramatically unsatisfying resolution, but Lost's was the creators all but going "Hey we had no idea what the fuck we were doing!"

Definitely not here to defend Lost's ending.  I mean, they tied themselves in such knots that all they could come up with was "it's all arbitrary nonsense because it was made up by a wizard who was in to arbitrary nonsense".  If the resolution of your fantasy epic involves playing a 20 year old Simpsons joke straight, it's safe to say your bed's a little shitty.

But The Dark Tower is a much better point of comparison, because 1) it's a series of books 2) that are fantasy 3) of a darker, more adult variety that 4) had a similarly drawn out release schedule.   And while Lost's gooey "everyone goes to heaven! YAY!!!" ending is downright embarrassing to my eyes, it seems to have left a good deal of casual fans feeling warm enough. The Dark Tower is almost universally recognized as having shat the bed so hard it broke the floorboards.

A lot of similar ground was covered in a thread I started some ways back.  I actually considered reviving it a while ago to talk about some finales I'd seen since, but then I thought I should probably just post in one of the many existing Lost threads since it would obviously take over.  Then I made a quesadilla.  Then I forgot.

I adored Battlestar Galactica, and I thought the ending was just fine until the last few minutes of the finale. We didn't need to know the truth about Baltar/Number Six or even Starbuck -- the ambiguity of those situations was handled in a way that I respected. But having the planet that the fleet finally lands on be our Earth, and having the Baltar and Number Six apparitions walking around together in modern New York City talking about fate and all that was so "too cool for school" and antithetical to the overall feel of the series. But, at least the series, after four very solid seasons, waited until the last five minutes to jump the shark.

I am developing a nerd crush on schwartz, wolving the calla indeed....not to mention shitting the bed and busting the floor boards...comedy gold!

I was just so happy to see that dance with dragons is coming out this summer, that there is actually a title and pages for the 6th book and a title for the last. Maybe with the NFL being locked out he can stop blogging about the damn Giants and actually write the next book.

Respect his comments. B5 had better arcs than both those shows. Budgets included i'd say thats pretty impressive.

So nice to be able to profess a liking for Babylon 5 here now that Devin's gone.

I kind of hate Babylon 5, and I think aside from my love of muppets and my lust for Claudia Black Farscape is kinda disliked too.

So at least somebody on this site can still act like I'm above you plebs.

I hated BG's ending so much that it made me despise the entire series, to the point that I will keep a VERY safe distance from any other work of Mr. Moore.

Lost.. well, I understand the criticism but I think many missed the point that it was never really about a great story arch (unlike BSG, at least in the intention): it was an experiment in narrative techniques, a convoluted sequence of challenges to the viewer, pulled by stretching the narrative canons and common viewing assumptions to their very limits. 

All of this graced by superb music, characters and acting. All in all, I'm still very fond of Lost.

That being said... well, at least they HAVE and ending.

The reason I'm not going to try and read/watch the Game of Thrones is that it's getting increasingly unlikely it'll ever HAVE one. 

Fell out of love with BSG somewhere around the thrid season so I can't comment on that.  However count me as someone who liked the ending to Lost (I would have prefered something more science based but still liked it) and really dug the 4 solid seasons of B5 we got.  I don't think you can blame the last season on anyone but the network and it's a credit to JMS that he managed to wrap things up so well at the end of season four.

And I still claim the Londo/Gkar storyline is one of the best charater arcs in any TV series ever.

Y U NO LIKE THE STUFF I DO, GUY WHO IS NOT ME!

He's not factually wrong on anything and while I disagree with some of it, his opinion doesn't seem egregious enough to be worth getting pissed off.  

The thing about the last season of B5 is that, while it's far from great, it doesn't damage anything that came before. Most of the important plotlines were resolved already so there wasn't much of a landing left to stick, and the last season is mostly made up of superfluous extra stuff. You could easily just skip directly to the finale and be done with it. Even though a lot of it sucks I'm kind of glad they made the last season if only because the final stretch of episodes is solid and the ending to Lando's story is quite powerful.

In a way I think the first season is worse because it takes so long to become good that I bet it turns off a lot of potential viewers. Seasons 2 to 4 are definitely where it's at.

Season 1 has a couple of important eppsodes though, for example the one about what happens to Babylon 4, which is called back to later in the series.

The thing is that Season 1 has about three of four 'important' episodes but no GOOD episodes. I tried a rewatch of the show a few years back and it was like hitting my head against a wall. 

I actually prefer DEEP SPACE NINE to B5. The early seasons get caught up in the usual Brannon/Braga new TREK guff, but once the Dominion arc kicks in proper it's basically a TREK precursor to Moore's BSG, religious musings and all.

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Originally Posted by Ken Savage 

Fell out of love with BSG somewhere around the thrid season so I can't comment on that.  However count me as someone who liked the ending to Lost (I would have prefered something more science based but still liked it) and really dug the 4 solid seasons of B5 we got.  I don't think you can blame the last season on anyone but the network and it's a credit to JMS that he managed to wrap things up so well at the end of season four.

 

And I still claim the Londo/Gkar storyline is one of the best charater arcs in any TV series ever.

Can I ask what made you stop liking Battlestar? I thought it might have been how the show became so sensationalist (the crap with the "final five cylons" got really tiresome, fast), but you loved the ending to Lost -- a series I thought was at least 75% sensationalism.

Is it bad that I'd rather talk about Battlestar Galactica than this author and his books/TV series/opinions on other properties?

It was no one thing to be honest, I missed a couple of episodes and tried to get back into it, failing badly.  It was just after the whole Pegasus thing, and the next episode I saw was Apollo trying to bust a black market ring.

As for B5, I understand what you are saying but that first season does a good job of establishing the characters, which makes it all the more interesting when their personal arcs kick in.

Oh, God, the Black Market episode is one of the worst. Please don't let that put you off watching the rest of the series. You missed the OlmosTache!

It's on Sky Atlantic so i might give it another go, I miss me some Olmos.

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Originally Posted by D.T. 

Can I ask what made you stop liking Battlestar? I thought it might have been how the show became so sensationalist (the crap with the "final five cylons" got really tiresome, fast),

 

It's a shame how much that totally took over the show in the home stretch, because it was about the only thing I really didn't like.  Even "Black Market" has Bill Duke!

Tigh and Tyrol are pretty amazing as part of the "Final Five" storyline, but the rest...not so much. Still, in terms of faith-heavy sci-fi finales I'd take BSG's cautionary tale over the fanfiction happy-ever-after church ending of LOST.

Agree on all counts.  There's a couple of good beats the story hits, but the Final Five probably should've been Final Three, really.

Regarding Babylon 5, because opinions vary so widely on the episodes and the seasons, I think the most useful thing to look at is the *consensus* view of fandom at large over the past 10 years. And there really is such a consensus.

The interesting thing is, that if you look at the episodes that are almost universally considered "bad" ("bad," in this case, meaning "sub-standard for Babylon 5"), you'll find three things:

1. There are very few of them. In the entire five-year, 110-episode run, I think there may be six or seven episodes that a clear majority of fans would point to as very weak.
2. All of them, without exception, have worthwhile elements, sometimes very worthwhile ones. (One of the most widely-panned episodes in Season 3 -- "Grey 17 is Missing" -- has a very shaky A-story, but the B-story is not only excellent in and of itself, it sets up an alliance that proves vital in Season 4.
3. JMS himself will be one of the people piling on...and these are usually scripts that he wrote himself.

And don't forget what "bad" means in this context: "Routine," "standard," "I've seen this before."

During Season 1, "Infection" could have shot for any of the Trek shows if you changed the names and a few details. It wouldn't have made a horrible Trek episode, just an unexceptional one. That's why it's such a bad B5 episode. B5 raised the bar.

(Star Trek at its best produced great SF television. But the signal-to-noise ratio on every Trek show was a lot worse than on B5. There was a lower percentage of really good episodes in all the Trek shows, and much higher proportions of both "ho-hum" installments and absolute dogs.)

"TKO" (the boxing episode) was a standard "fish-out-of-water" and "Rocky"-style sports story. But the B-story did a lot to humanize Susan Ivanova, and it deepened her character. I'll put up with a standard bounce on a boxing movie to advance the development of a major character any day.

Similarly, "Infection" went beyond its cliché "ancient weapon" story and its preachy "there-is-no-Master-Race" message to introduce the shady Interplanetary Expeditions, and have EarthGov's bio-weapons division show up to take possession of all the evil scientist's data. (This would be like Starfleet Intelligence showing up at the end of "The Doomsday Machine" to seize all of the records of the incident from the Enterprise's computers, swear eveyone to secrecy, and then go off to try to duplicate the thing themselves.)

Yet, when rewatching Babylon 5, there really isn't a single episode that's skippable, in terms of containing important elements relating to the five-year arc, even if you've already seen the show at least once. None of the Star Trek shows can really make that same claim -- even when watching TOS, I usually end up dropping half of Season 3 from my viewing-queue, to say nothing of the first two years of TNG (and pretty much all of VOY).

No offence, but that whole post reads like it was written from a B5 uberfan's point of view.

     Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Merriweather 

Oh, God, the Black Market episode is one of the worst. Please don't let that put you off watching the rest of the series. You missed the OlmosTache!

It needed 100% more Bill Duke being awesome and beating 25 Cylons to death with his bare hands, but it's nowhere near as bad an episode as nerd-fandom has made it out to be over the years.

Listening to the podcast commentary while watching it does make for some pretty entertaining viewing, though.

    Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Merriweather 

No offence, but that whole post reads like it was written from a B5 uberfan's point of view.

To be sure, I tend to prefer BSG and Lost over B5 these days, but back in the day...B5 was indeed the shit.

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Originally Posted by Leto II 

 

To be sure, I tend to prefer BSG and Lost over B5 these days, but back in the day...B5 was indeed the shit.

One of the saddest and most shameful incidents of my life was giving up a weekend on the beach and an almost guaranteed hook-up so I could watch the conclusion the the war of the shadows. Every time I think about it I want to travel back in time and bash my own head in. 

As I've said before, I think the finale of BSG is decent--it's the season leading up to it that shits the bed. Curse you, writer's strike. But at least the writers are actually trying to make their various dangling plot threads make sense (

is hella awkward but at least the writers are acknowledging they wrote their way into a corner and attempting to find a way out).

I recently watched the first episode of Babylon 5. It's hilariously clunky and cheesy, with stiff acting, laughably awful CGI effects, and a Star Wars-style determination to cram more and more geeky clutter into every scene, but without anywhere near the budget (the bit where the two leads don insanely bulky oxygen masks to walk through two corridors, then immediately take them off again, had me on the floor.) But I kind of loved it. They don't make this kind of unapologetically dense and geeky SF show anymore (except maybe Doctor Who, and even that has been watered down a lot) and I've never had a problem with awful, dated FX--I mean, any fan of classic Star Trek who grew up in the 90s or later would have to be able to see past that shit.

As for the Dark Tower series...it's Stephen King. When has he EVER stuck the landing? The guy simply doesn't plan his storylines in advance, and he doesn't seem to do second drafts, either. I don't think you can compare any writer, Martin included, to that.

The final season of BSG has some painful episodes, but that whole mutiny arc is the bee's knees. Plus some gleefully twisted part of me took great pleasure in that one really, really depressing episode. You know which one. Oh, plus Baltar trying to manipulate that Centurion into rising up against his masters only to have it blown up RIGHT AWAY made me laugh. 

But yeah, I think Moore mentioned that, for every kick ass space battle gun fight heavy episode they had, they had to make three "nothing at all happens" episodes.