S4 DVD; okay Morphing has gotten nasty

I just got the S4 set in the mail from Amazon (and it was only shipped yesterday free via USPS – I am impressed!)

I naturally set out to watch all the original stuff first – the commentary, specials, and bloopers. I must say that the commentaries were subpar compared to the rest of the DVD sets. There were two main problems.

First, the cast commentary had too many people: Boxleitner, Doyle, Jurasik, and Tallman. When they were on, they were very, very funny. Through most of the episode (“Falling toward Apotheosis”), though, they seemed afraid of stepping on one another and so kept silent. They were also (bar Jurasik and especially Tallman) woefully ignorant of the episode, and so kept stating clunkers like “why did I do this?” The least they could have done was watch the episode ahead of time so as not to sound like boobs. When Doyle said “Maybe I should have watched this series” in the season 2 commnetaries it was funny. The joke has worn thin by now.

Second, JMS shares one of the commentaries with director Mike Vejar, and selects the mosy unlikely episode of them all for his own commentary. The co-Vejar ep, “Faces of the Enemy” is an excellent episode to show the directorial side of things, and Vejar should have been left to himself for that one. The solo JMS episode, “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” wasn’t worth a commentary. It was obviously quickly written, filmed, and edited to make the schedule to be shown at the end of season four (because it wasn’t started until the beginning of season five, so it could replace the season-four-ending “Sleeping in Light”) and quite frankly was a clunker of an episode. JMS’s commentary seems an attempt to lift up its rep but the show and his defense of it just demonstrate the severe (and understandable) shortcomings under which it was filmed.

I think JMS commentaries on “The Long Night” and “Epiphanies” would have been more appropriate (or maybe “Endgame” instead of one of the above).

To be totally picky, I loved the original Christopher Franke orchestral score done for the DVD, but have to ask why it couldn’t have been done as a accompaniment to a chronological video representation of the series? As it is, the video messes with time quite badly. In chrono order, it would have been more powerful and maybe could have been released to the music video channels as an ad for the show. Even better would have been the chrono video with the music PLUS SOUNDS that made CF’s work so striking. The purely musical element left out half of CF’s repertroire.

The eps themselves seem quite well-done, with better CGI than in the past, though I have only had a chance to see a couple of eps.