Imagine if when the creators were taking Star Trek The Motion Picture if they decided to replace all your favorite characters with generic ones, and Spock was replaced by a really badly dressed Texan? In fact imagine if the only thing kept the same was Bill Shatner as Kirk?

As we’re getting closer and closer to the real of ‘The Live Action Transformers’ movie it seems that the creators have absolutely no clue what the franschise is about. They’ve completely re-tooled all the characters, ditching boxy characters for more alien looking ones, completely retooled Megatron, and now in the final blow to all hard core fans not hiring Frank Welker for the voice of Megatron and choosing to go with Hugo Weaving.

I can understanding wanting to make the robots more realistic, and bring the franchise more up to date. I can even understand that they can’t have Megatron as a gun. Still, the only way this movie is going to make money is if the fan boys see their favorite characters back in the roles they made well. Hiring Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime was the only thing they did right, but it seems that Michael Bay has no clue what really makes a Transformers movie. Let alone, it will probably be filled with so many bad action sequences and no human emotion that it’ is going to suck as much as Armadegon did.

Frank Welker MADE Megatron in the original series. He was the evil voice that made us all cringe, Hugo Weaver can barely act his way out of paper bag. The only hope is that Steven Spielberg makes this movie really pull out all the stops special effect wise to make it worth wild to be seen more than one in a theater.

SPOILER WARNING!

Ok so Starbuck isn’t dead? So why did Executive Procedurer Ronald D. Moore claim she was dead on the podcast? Up until the episode they indicated that they would not define her as being dead, and yet on his very own podcast he kept insisting they had killed her off? Talk about entrapment of the fans, this was really foul play for the sake of the art! Bad Mr. Moore.

Seems like a lot of my favorite shows are jumping the shark lately. LOST has become annoyingly stupid, Desperate Housewives actually closed some of their story lines, Smallville has gotten drawn out way too long (he should be flying now) and The Daily Show seems to be off game lately while The Colbert Report seems to be chugging along at full steam. Seems like its going to be a bad year for television.

Battlestar Galatica has officially jumped the shark. The show which has proven to be the most groundbreaking show since 2004 last weekend did the worst thing it could ever do by killing off a major character (if she is truly dead.) The prime hero Starbuck decides finally that death is something not to be feared and as such, decides to embrance death and kill herself by flying into a cloud that completely collapses her spacecraft.

Dumb and idiotic. I know what the creator was going for here, in that they wanted to do something bold and daring. But just because you can do something bold and daring doesn’t mean you should, and this case is the perfect example. The whole structure of the episodes reminds me of several LOST episodes where character’s lives are replayed, often coming to some sort of conclusion, and then killed at the end right after a realization is reached. Here BSG falls into the same trap as LOST, providing us with a backstory to a character, but no reason or rhyme death is even needed.

Starbuck’s supposed death server absolutely no purpose to the series, and if it does prove to be a benefit somewhere down the line, then it really was a waste to even bother with getting to know the character in the first place. What purpose did all these painting and images hold, what is the reason for the vision, and what is her special destiny? Death? These all make no sense and hold more to the fact that the creators of the show had nothing else to write about, so they decided to kill a character simply because they couldn’t write anything better. Shallow deaths on TV server no purpose. Tasha Yar’s death on Star Trek was another that really was meaningless except to show the public ‘hey we can kill a character any time we want.’ Thankfully her death was vindicated with the alternative timeline plot.

Starbuck’s death does nothing more than confuse the viewers and frustrated them. Confusion I have read is not an emotion and as such the purpose of this particular episode is really not clear. The plot holes of letting Starbuck get back into the cockpit and doing nothing to stop her also simply do not add up. If the writers wanted the character to go out in a major way they should have done it with more heroic death. Yes real people don’t always die that way, and sometimes it’s meaningless, but were already faced with meaningless in the real world. Give us some fantasy to brighten our day if you’re going to completely change the series. This is the the least the writers could have done.