Tube Steak: Reasons I Dislike "Battlestar Galactica" -- Part Three

Sorry for the delay in coming back to you with another installment in this heavily read and much demanded series. In the first two installments I railed on the use of the word 'frak' and the disingenuous use of sex as a selling point. Of the myriad qualms I have with this show, first and foremost after those two items is the atrocious acting of model Tricia Helfer. Now, outside of EJO, none of the acting in this series as above reproach. I take great issue with nearly every putrid word that pours forth from the mouths of these basic cable* actors, but the "acting" of one Tricia Helfer deserves its own post.

*And basic cable in this case is more a reference to the 1990s way of thinking about basic cable television. The "Silk Stalkings"/"Weird Science" ilk is what I'm referring to here. Think Rob Estes. Think Vanessa Angel. I recognize that cable television is now more viable than network television in terms of finding legitimate prime-time programming of a high enough quality to warrant actually spending your valuable time watching it. If anything, that actually pisses me off more insofar as this dreck-fest "BSG".

After eleven years of professional modeling, she took to acting and unfurled her horribly breathy schtick on the world. Clearly, she impressed the producers and casting director for "Battlestar Galactica" with her star turn as a guest star in an episode of "CSI: Not the One with Horatio Caine" and her showstopping performance as the fifth-billed actor in the much-lauded independent film White Rush, which is currently sitting at a rock-solid 4.9 user rating on IMDB. Based on this body of work, they cast Tricia Helfer to play sexy cylon and rest much of the viability of the show on the shoulders of someone with the necessary chops.

Fucking brilliant.

Inspired.

Dipshits.

So now, when that special someone is watching "BSG", I get to suffer through Ms. Helfer's imitation of acting. Her facial twitching as she sputters out every preposterous line in her permanent fuck me whisper. Her facial twitching that leads me to belief that she might actually have Tourette's or some other condition that could explain a facial tic while I pray for a Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf-ian cursing fit to slip by the censors who must be as bored as I am. Her involuntary eye-widening followed by eye-narrowing that is supposed to be sexy but fails miserably and is simply distracting and off-putting. These things are causing me actual physical and psychic pain.

This isn't even hitting on the sad attempts at luring virginal fanboys into her web of lies and deceit which I already discussed at length. If they actually knew what a woman's touch felt like or how women acted, this would not be effective. Yet in the winter of 2007, these young (and not-so-young) men were mustering up the courage to ask the clerk at the convenience store to reach a little behind them to their left and toss in that magazine in the black plastic to the one-liter of Mountain Dew, the $3.59 bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos, and the Almond Joy that they just plopped down on the counter as a weak ploy to excuse the fact that the only reason they went in there in the first place was to buy the only issue of Playboy they have ever glimpsed (but only because Summer Glau and Gillian Anderson haven't posed) in their lives just so that they can finally see what those goddamn cameras won't let them.

And if you ask me, that career move was more than encouraged by the show's producers because from the onset they've been peddling pseudo-soft-core space smut to unwitting virgins who cannot see that they're being used, and the saddest part is that they're being played by one of the worst actresses in the world--one who defines acting by fucking around with her eyes as much as possible and breathing on whoever is close to her.

Fuck this show.