Saturday, October 21, 2006

Wirestar Gallactica

There's the daily staple of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to keep me sane; then there's the delectable, epicurian feasts that come once a week from two of the best dramas arguable ever broadcast on U.S. television, The Wire and Battlestar Gallactica. Regular readers know I've written about them before, but I'm inspired anew by each to make this posting. (SPOILERS for this week's Battlestar below.)

One of the scariest supporting roles this year actually opened the season with a bi-level conversation at a home improvements store, where "Snoop" bought a nail gun to use in her job as hit-person for a young druglord. A lot of my friends have mistaken Snoop for a guy, and they're not to be faulted. The actress, Felicia Pearson, is an authentic product of the Baltimore streets, as profiled by the New York Times in a fascinating piece that just ran:
"I was a crack baby," Ms. Pearson said by telephone from Baltimore. "I was, like, three pounds, and I had to get fed with an eyedropper." She started selling drugs at 10 and at 14 was locked up for more than seven years after shooting a woman. "I grew up not giving a damn about anything, because why give a damn if you are in a foster home and your parents didn’t care anything about you?" Ms. Pearson said. She added that she had so many drugs in her system when she was born that she was cross-eyed as a child. "Kids would tease me, saying that I’m cross-eyed and don’t have a real mother, and all those kids who said those mean things, I beat the hell out of them," she said.

Hmm, seems it makes sense to be especially polite to Ms. Pearson should you be fortunately enough to meet her...

Felicia was discovered at a Baltimore nightclub by Michael K. Williams, who so charistmatically plays the fan-adored Omar character on the show. He brought her to the show's producers and the rest is history in the making.

The Wire is skipping a week, so there won't be a new episode tonight, but I got a jolly fix of epic episodic with Friday's highly climactic Battlestar Gallactica blast.

(It's SPOILERVILLE from hereon -- not total, but if you're a die-hard fan waiting to see the ep, hold off on reading.)

It's no secret that the show is highly political and highly charged on a mirror-reflection of the current Iraq War. Only this week, the occupiers lost, big-time. While the humans engineered a masterful evacuation of what had become their prison planet, the Cylons were forced to, ultimately, cut and run.

Precognition, maybe?

While the sheer cajones of playing out the dramatic conceit as we read about civil war openly engaged in southern Iraq, American "arrogance" and "stupidity" (from one of our own senior diplomats), and a Presidente forced to make press releases about a tactics conference while categorically refusing to alter strategy is momentous enough, I was equally struck by the pictoral ambition.

This write-up on the episode covers all the major plot bases (and biblical references), but best of all there are links to two incredible clips of the rescue operation that had been built to for so long. Both of them have the strong special effects that make the world of the show seem so real, but on such a phenomenal scale that it harkens way, way back to the best science fiction covers of the old pulp magazines.

In fact, the Pegasus sequence in particular is like a Robert Heinlein story come to life. The hardware looks all the more real (as it is blasted into pieces) because of the handheld/documentary style shooting on the show. In a sense it does those old Astounding sci-fi covers a greater service by not presenting the scenes in pristine, obviously composed manner. You're in a world beyond your imagination, but you're right there in the mix.

Bottom line is that both shows are not only appealingly political, but they have the texture of authenticity. Is it so much to ask for even from any hour of televised dramatic entertainment -- the real deal?

No comments: