Battica had all the tools needed to tell a great story, and then p*ssed it away. I'm baffled by the acclaim it got as the greatest sf show of all time, the greatest show on TV, etc. Have these people ever watched any sf, or any TV? To take the most obvious contrasting example, The 4400, which inhabits much the same territory, has characters and plots that are...well, characters and plots. On that show, the continual reversals of attitude typical of the soap form are made plausible. On Battica they aren't. But they aren't exactly implausible either, since most of Battica's characters are non-characters to start with, and so can do one thing as soon as another, for any reason or none. That's no basis for a plot, and so most of the time the Battica shows have no plot; just incidents in search of one.
Razor, amazingly, does have a plot, and a character, and good ones. It does its best to p*ss both away, but doesn't quite succeed, and so ends up being much the best thing the show ever did. The central character-- or the one who would have been central, if the promise of the early scenes had been followed through on--is a soldier who loses her innocence, and more, to war. The character is well conceived, better conceived than written, but Stephanie Jacobsen's portrayal of her compensates for the shortcomings in the script. Jacobsen is a tough, lucid, grounded actress, and from her performance we can derive the portions of her character's arc that aren't shown. This turns out to be necessary, since her story is hijacked along the way, and she's crowded out by the usual wooden non-characters in the usual trifling non-plot.
What a stew this show was! Artsy camera-work and music, coupled with hack writing and ham acting; magic in place of science; video game graphics in place of battle; kneejerk violence (the show was quite fond of beatings); confused politics (the heroes were antiterrorists and terrorists at the same time--Israel and the PLO); and always the same endless stalling, seducing striptease, the effort to fool us into thinking it was all going somewhere and to keep us watching. But lo, in the midst of the rubbish appeared a compelling human being facing a troubling problem--drama, in other words. Since Battica never had any more sense of what it had than what it lacked, she was just grist to its mill.
Yet she lingers in the mind.
Razor, amazingly, does have a plot, and a character, and good ones. It does its best to p*ss both away, but doesn't quite succeed, and so ends up being much the best thing the show ever did. The central character-- or the one who would have been central, if the promise of the early scenes had been followed through on--is a soldier who loses her innocence, and more, to war. The character is well conceived, better conceived than written, but Stephanie Jacobsen's portrayal of her compensates for the shortcomings in the script. Jacobsen is a tough, lucid, grounded actress, and from her performance we can derive the portions of her character's arc that aren't shown. This turns out to be necessary, since her story is hijacked along the way, and she's crowded out by the usual wooden non-characters in the usual trifling non-plot.
What a stew this show was! Artsy camera-work and music, coupled with hack writing and ham acting; magic in place of science; video game graphics in place of battle; kneejerk violence (the show was quite fond of beatings); confused politics (the heroes were antiterrorists and terrorists at the same time--Israel and the PLO); and always the same endless stalling, seducing striptease, the effort to fool us into thinking it was all going somewhere and to keep us watching. But lo, in the midst of the rubbish appeared a compelling human being facing a troubling problem--drama, in other words. Since Battica never had any more sense of what it had than what it lacked, she was just grist to its mill.
Yet she lingers in the mind.