Of twisters and toasters

So I’m sitting here looking at this screen on my old PC (aka Orac)…

The red boxes are tornado warnings; the whole lot of that is slowly shuffling in this general direction. That’s not why I originally had Orac fired up again today after a few days of sleep, though.
This is the planet Mars – or at least a simulated view of it, as seen from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter this afternoon.

When I wasn’t stranded in the bathroom due to the usual fun stomach issues, I was enjoying watching that disk grow from the size of a silver dollar to the size of a CD to the size of Something That Completely Fills That Window. It reminded me of the similar view you got when approaching a planet at breakneck speed in the Apple II game The Halley Project, only more nerve-wracking.

(I also had a Doctor Who audio play cranked in my CD player, as illustrated by Atari Video Music in that picture-in-picture window. It’s rather strange to fill the house with the sounds of Dalek voices loud enough that they can probably be heard outside…)

Little did I know I’d be sitting here off-and-on tonight watching something else big and red zooming toward me…
Now, for a moment, let’s talk toasters. And by toasters I mean Cylons. And that means the villains who played the human race like a piano in tonight’s really, really, really shocking season finale. Damn! I have been studiously avoiding any spoiler for Galactica that doesn’t come in the form of n openly-announced casting decision (i.e. lots of Lucy Lawless next season), so I was completely caught off guard by just about everything in tonight’s episode. Especially the last half hour or so – I kept expecting it to be some kind of negated future a la It’s A Wonderful Life, or a Bobby Ewing In The Shower thing. I know better to expect that from the folks making Galactica, but bear with me – I’m still deprogramming myself after years of exposure to the Star Trek Reset Button, which has led me to expect the expected with every episode.
Not so here. I remember a first-season episode of ST:TNG, Conspiracy (one of my all-time Trek faves to this day) that seemed to imply that a covert invasion of the Federation was underway. Gene Roddenberry nixed any continuation of that dark, violent plotline, but I remember thinking, in my 14-year-old enthusiasm, that the whole show was about to take a dark and very cool turn as Our Heroes found themselves fighting against the Federation they were sworn to protect…and of course, it vanished, and a few years later I would better understand why that plotline didn’t continue. Now that a huge turn in the overall storyline not unlike that which I envisioned over half my life ago is, in fact, happening on Galactica, I’m just stunned. And y’know what? I’m gonna keep on avoiding those spoilers. I just can’t imagine why anyone would want this show spoiled.
Now, that said, I’m hoping that the one giant leap in the show’s narrative timeline does not mean that we’re in for a huge dose of Lost-style flashbacks to the events alluded to in between (Apollo and Starbuck no longer friends, Tyrol and Cally hooking up, Gaeta teaming up with his new boss, etc.; or an extended Lost-style-rewind-and-replay-from-a-point-about-halfway-in-and-catch-up-with-the-cliffhanger-later. It’s not so much that I can’t handle that (I’m already watching Lost, after all), but in a way I hope it’s not the case just so the fans don’t start grumbling about how the show’s gone downhill, yada yada yada. On the other hand, I do wonder where the heck Tom Zarek is on Gnu Caprica. I worry about Zarek most when I can’t see what he’s up to. 😆
For some reason I just wasn’t as gripped by tonight’s two Stargate episodes. I just felt that SG-1’s cliffhanger was very manufactured – this was definitely a death march episode, as the real fun was in the middle part of the show with stuff like Daniel’s bad timing – and the shock ending of Atlantis kind left me unimpressed. Atlantis, especially, is injecting Dr. Weir with a dose of Janeway Syndrome – inconsistent handling of a prominent, intelligent, highly principled female character by a male writing staff. My first thought on the decision to cooperate or not to cooperate with the Wraith was that they should blow that ship out of the sky, because one someone successfully blackmails you once, they won’t hesitate to use that tactic again. I was proven right in about half an hour. Weir should’ve been a lot smarter than she was here. She’s been smarter than that before.
From toasters back to twisters for a moment, before I sign off, as warm as our winter has been, and as fast and furious as the storm action is already (storm season technically isn’t even supposed to have begun yet), the thought of how this spring is going to be scares the crap out of me.
Speaking of which, I’m gonna shut this down before the clouds eat me. Bye bye. 😯