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Old February 4th, 2021, 02:21 PM   #23
Eric Paddon
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Location: Morristown, NJ
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Default Re: Revisiting The Old Novelizations

#8-Greetings From Earth by Ron Goulart

0.5 of 5 Stars

-Honestly, after going through this I should go back and add a half-star each to the first two novelizations. Those are magnificent reads compared to this. And it's not just the fact that this is one of the worst episodes being adapted. Unlike Thurston and Yermakov who at least had a clear grasp of the series as a whole in their own way, Goulart has zero grasp of the mythos of the series. When he isn't giving us a pedestrian retelling of what wasn't a great episode to begin with, his ideas of addition and changes border on the embarrassing.

-We're greeted to a subplot of Jolly trying to romance a med-tech named Zixi. She frets that she doesn't have a name like Ann Marie (!) or Dolly (!!). Jolly is always being called away before they can have any fun.

-Sire Geller is wrongly described as an overly fat man with many chins.

-If you thought the Vector-Hector byplay was bad in the episode, its WORSE in this novelization. Here, Hector is more like a little boy and we've got a whole scene of him complaining about how Vector never took him to baseball games!

-We have a change in the form of squatters living in the ruins of Paradeen's capital city including basically the equivalent of a motorcycle gang. A redheaded woman who is one member knocks out Hector and she is the one who takes Starbuck into the ruins.

-In a blatant case of red herring playing, Goulart tries to fool the reader into thinking Terra is Earth. The scene where Wilker says the spacecraft indicates it came from a planet named Terra is changed to Earth. Starbuck finds books in the library that refer to Earth. None of it works and we don't get any backstory of note to give the story the clarity in never had.

#9, also by Goulart I know isn't going to be better. Because that one, in its zeal to adapt "Baltar's Escape" forgets the reimagined ending of the "War Of The Gods" novelization!
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