I've said it before and I'll say it again: "Alien Resurrection" was a perfectly serviceable first draft of "Firefly."

But what about when the batteries run out, hmm? WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW.

"In the Blink of an Eye" is one of those weird books that, every so often, you have to remind yourself not everyone has read. It seems so obvious, it's easy to assume that everybody's practically got it memorized.

Ohyeah. I wanted to say a couple things, but I got all caught up in my fawning.

It's not a big deal, but I was a little surprised (since y'all were in this sort of mood) that nobody mentioned the flaming sword bit. The opening title card with the quote from Genesis describes God placing a flaming sword in the Garden of Eden to protect the tree of life … and the Mayan who stabs Tomas wields a literal flaming sword. It's a little on the nose as symbols go, but I liked the blending of Mayan and Christian myth.

And talking of myth, this one's a bit harder for me to put into words, and may be nonsense. At the end of the film, the Mayan priest-whoever-guy (with the flaming sword) appears to see Tom the astronaut in place of Tomas the conquistador. He refers to him as First Father. I'm not all up on my Mayan cosmology, but presumably First Father was, well, the first father, maybe the Mayan equivalent of Adam or something, but at the very least a figure believed to be central to the creation of the world.

And the whole theme of the movie revolves around the notion that people have to die in order to give life to others.

And Tom, the astronaut, appears to die when Xibalba explodes. And Tom, the astronaut, is the Mayan First Father. Which means by dying — finally, after what surely must have been thousands of years at least — Tom is responsible for creating the world.

I've had to start listening to this one three times. Because by the time the movie gets to the second scene, I'm engrossed and not listening to you guys any more.

That's not a dig against y'all. That's an illustration of how much I love this goddamn movie.

Studio compromises aren't always bad. If I remember right, the original "V" miniseries was originally written as a period piece of historical fiction set in Europe in the 30s. Something something I don't remember what, and then it became a twenty-minutes-into-the-future sci-fi allegory, and for my money one of the best examples of an alien invasion story. (The sequel miniseries, spin-off series and latter-day remake were all terrible, tho.)

That kind of brings us back to what I said before, when I said I didn't want to hijack Brian's thread right before I hijacked Brian's thread. I'm not seeing it, so pitch it to me. How do you do a serialized TV story with aliens where the aliens (a) must by necessity be aliens; their precise role in the story couldn't be equivalently filled by other human beings, and (b) are interesting?

Cause I'm thinking about it here, and to be honest I'm drawing a blank.

Oh. And assume your budget is unlimited and you can hire every VFX artist on the planet. And your render farm is the size of Kentucky.

I smiley-face-emoticon back at you, 'cause it's Friday and we're all having fun here. But no, that's not actually what I was saying. Well. Sort of—NO. No, I was right and smart and good and I will stick to that.

If aliens think like us — if they reason and believe and feel in ways that would be more-or-less recognizable coming from our next-door neighbors — then their motivations should make sense. In human history, there've been myriad pogroms and acts of systematic aggression against the Jews, for example, the Nazi holocaust being obviously the most notorious. Trying to wipe out an entire race (for lack of a better word) of people? Crazy talk! But if you look at each of those events, there was at least some kind of rationale behind it. It didn't begin and end with "arg, we hate the Jews, let us kill all of them." It started somewhere else and ended with let-us-kill-all-of-them.

"The Chronicles of Riddick" is not, by any reasonable definition of the phrase, a good movie. (I happen to like it anyway, but that's neither here nor there.) The bad guys in that movie have this whole religion based on the idea that paradise exists on the other side of death, and your reward over there is proportional to how many souls you usher across the veil while you're here. Murder and genocide are their mitzvot.

Or take the Reavers from "Firefly." I forget the actual line of dialogue that introduced them, but it's a single line of dialogue. Something along the lines of, "They went out into the darkness and looked out and saw nothing and went insane." That's a motivation. It's a fucking scary motivation, 'cause I think there's something about it that resonates. We've all looked into an abyss at one time or another, and all felt that lingering notion that maybe we left a part of ourselves behind there. It's not that big a leap to imagine leaving all of ourselves there. (Or maybe that's just me.)

If you want me to accept omnicidal aliens, all I ask in return is that their reason for being omnicidal be understandable, or at least interesting.

On the other hand, aliens can be so different, so bizarre, so weird that nothing they ever do could be considered reasonable by our standards … but in that case, go all the way with it. I mean like "Solaris" all-the-way here. Of course, in that case the aliens are really more part of the setting than they are characters. They're akin to a force of nature, in terms of the part they play in the story.

Of course, all this high-minded nattering I'm doing goes right out the window if the other aspects of the story are sufficiently entertaining/cool/interesting/provocative/fun to outweigh what I would call storytelling shortcomings vis a vis the aliens themselves. The motivation of the aliens in "War of the Worlds" (by which I mean the 1953 George Pal film version) is dismissed with a single line of dialogue taken verbatim from the book: "Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our Earth with envious eyes." Envious eyes. Gotcha. Good enough for a start. Now as long as the rest of the story is great — and in that case it was — then I'm on board.

The original 70s cylons (hello, topic!) were not interesting, and the rest of the story that was told around them was not great.

I don't want to hijack Brian's thread. But either here or somewhere else, I'd love to hear what those damned reasonable reasons might actually be. I've never actually encountered a story with space aliens who want to exterminate humanity that made a lick of sense. Either the aliens were just inherently genocidal maniacs — like, as an in-born character trait — or their motivations were dumb.

Not to try to defend the show here any more than I already have, but the motivation of the cylon was built in to the backstory: they were created as robot slaves, and they rebelled against their masters with such hatred that they attempted wholesale extermination. Not the most original premise in the world, but at least it's a sensible one.

If you just replace the cylon with aliens, then the "we created them" thing has to disappear, obviously. Which means we had to encounter the aliens somehow somewhere along the way and then enslave them, which isn't the sort of thing you want your protagonists to be on the hook for. Kinda erodes audience sympathy a bit.

Generally I have little patience for aliens in science fiction. There are definitely authors out there — I've got a soft spot for Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle — who can write aliens that actually make sense, and give them motivations that are nonsensical in a human context but that are really quite reasonable given the aliens' … well … alienness. But far more often, aliens are either just monsters by another name or people with funny haircuts, and personally I'd rather hear stories about monsters or people.

Screw it. Let's just hurry up and get an adaptation of "The Mote in God's Eye" made. It'll have to be twelve hours long, like "The Lord of the Rings." Shoot three or four super-epic movies all at once and release 'em every six months for two years. They'll make ten billion dollars and win every award there is.

In my beautiful, beautiful dreams.

Hmm. I can see some truth in that. I enjoy hard-sci-fi as much as the next guy — more or less — and I dug the early episode where the military briefed the civilian government on the water shortage by explaining that space is a barren, empty place and that all they could do was search nearby stars with optical telescopes. That was cool.

But I also can understand that a show with that premise and those rules can only end one way: slow extinction. Lost between the stars with minimal resources and no hope? Either magic has to happen, or everybody dies freezing and alone.

Plus, there's this other point that I'm about to make right now…

Again, I see where you're coming from, and I can't really argue, 'cause we're talking about opinions here. But I, speaking as a member of the audience, never felt insulted. One of the things I liked about the show was the fact that the cylons weren't monolithic. They had a variety of agendas and points of view, depending on which model you were listening to at the time. The cylons had a plan, or at least one model did, but it was a complete failure, and most of the run of the show consisted of the cylons trying to find their way out of the mess they'd gotten themselves into. That was a story I hadn't seen before.

And really, that's what it all boiled down to for me. Yes, the writers made the show up as they went along. But you know what? I was always entertained. At no point did I reach my personal threshold of tolerance for stupidity, a threshold I crossed with "Lost" very early on in its run. I concede that every point you've made is valid, and based in truth, but none of that changes the fact that I enjoyed the hell out of that show, and still find it has re-watch value. Hell, the part where Starbuck winks at Tigh during the briefing in "The Hand of God" alone earns my forgiveness for a multitude of sins.

EDIT: I seem to have neglected to make my actual point. What I mean to say is this: The rules of storytelling — rules, guidelines, whatever — exist for a reason, and they're good rules. But the fact remains that sometimes it's possible for a story to work, to entertain, to captivate, despite breaking those rules. Sometimes rules are broken by geniuses who are transcending the art form, and sometimes rules are broken by dumb schmucks who don't know any better, and doesn't it just suck that either the genius or the dumb schmuck has a chance of succeeding despite his deliberate or accidental iconoclasty.

(And before anybody tries to horn in on my thing, I've totally got dibs on naming a band "The Accidental Iconoclasty.")

Although I really want to, I can't really disagree with anything you've said here, Brian. It's just that for me, the math works out differently. The shortcomings in the big-picture story-with-a-capital-S are, for me, outweighed by all the little awesomenesses.

There haven't been many TV shows that have engaged me as thoroughly and consistently as Galactica did. There were episodes that weren't as great, but I'd be hard pressed to think of more than a couple bad episodes. (I'm one of the few people who didn't hate "Black Market," ferinstance. But I still won't defend "The Woman King.")

If you look at the show as a single work of art, then yes, it's a bit rambly, and it doesn't have a very tightly constructed plot. But the characters were so solid that I found myself less interested from episode to episode in what happened than in how it happened. If that makes any sense.

Really, the show had balls. It had the balls to be dark and serious at a time when that really hadn't been done before. There's that story that's been told a few times, can't remember where it started; in the first regular episode, everybody is suffering from sleep deprivation. At one point, Adama's gets handed a brief telling him what's been going on. In one take, Olmos was reading it and he ad-libbed a line like "…and four suicides." It ended up getting cut because it was too dark, but that's the sandbox those guys wanted to play in. I mean hell, the first significant event in the pilot was the cold-blooded murder of an infant. That took balls, and I respect that.

Really, though, it's the whole context of the thing that charms me. A handful of not-especially-well-known-outside-the-genre TV writers pitched a show to a third-tier basic-cable network and in the process effectively redefined what serialized genre drama could be. If it wasn't flawless, okay, fine, but I have a hard time getting angry about that because of how much those guys managed to get right. It was bold and audacious and cocky as hell, and they ended up doing pretty freakin' well with it, so yay.

Finally … come on. The Adama Maneuver? Kind of the best thing ever.