BSG: Better Late than Never →[More:]So anyway, I started out a year late with the series, and then my nephew got interested in a girlfriend and I waited for that to end, and it hasn't, so I'm finally going ahead with Season 2.

I really liked some of the first episodes in Season 1, but by the end of those 13, I was feeling a little like they were losing steam with the format, and were having trouble filling story arcs with the characters they had. Kobol's Last Gleaming was pretty promising, though.

So I really liked the first episodes of S2, especially the "Scattered", "Valley of Shadows", "Fragged", "Resistance" arc. The first of those had a bit of an Act 2 quality -- sorting out storylines and characters -- but the next three had action, character development, and all the great production values (including incidental music) I liked.

Now I'm up to "The Farm", the first of S2 that I'd say was at all discordant or rushed. The markers of the shows I didn't like from S1 -- things end up certain ways, but they don't show you how they got there, you just have to say "but of course!"

The whole of "Fragged" was terrific, though, especially the Baltar and Tyrol character arcs (and with Cally, Seelix, and Crashdown all well fleshed out and true to themselves). Tigh showed how he both had the authority and the respect to command but the character flaws to fuck it up.

About the only too-convenient bit was Ellen Tigh showing up at the brig for no apparent reason. And they should watch the blood-dripping-across-the-face make-up shorthand for "walking wounded", it was seriously overused.

Yet there are so many times that they get the little things right. Tigh rolling his whiskey bottle over the probably-badly-photoshopped prop of him and younger Vice-era Edward James Olmos was cute -- turn a flaw (stock trick of an old photo of the real actor) into a character moment.

I also liked the Cally-Boomer reenactment of the Ruby-Oswald shooting, obvious to many viewers but so thoroughly contextualized to the story that it did not distract.

What else? Oh, some of these had Baltar conversing with Six only in his head, others had his talking back to her in simultaneous conversation with somebody else, as in "33", which I love as a technique but must be bloody hard to write and act. It's a tightrope I don't need to see them show off on every episode, I guess.

Anyway, obviously, I'm the kind of analytical watcher that sees the artifice and evaluates how successful it was, rather than just calling it out, you see.

Comments, no later S2 or S3 spoilers, though, naturally. I have managed to avoid all but the biggest. ;-)