filmreroll

Galaxy Quest (Part 1)

Added 2023-09-18 18:05:35 +0000 UTC

I really should get the DM to do these write-ups, but I never think to until I’m writing them up.

Galaxy Quest has felt really good. Really back to basics after a series of mostly really complex eps with a lot of moving pieces. In a sense it‘s a really natural Reroll, but in another it’s kind of a difficult one in that what the main characters want is not always completely clear: the characters are very much passengers; prisoners of circumstance that the story drives along from setpiece to setpiece. Those kinds of stories, when unmoored from the engineered plot contrivances that anchor them, can become unwound when left to the vicissitudes of improv.

But so far, what I’ve gotten out of it is that this is a really fun world to play in. Jon is a master of creating real science and real mechanics around his sci-fi babble. Often it doesn’t come across in the recording, but the Reroll doesn’t work if you don’t create a scaffolding of logic around the gobbledygook that writers can use to solve sci-fi problems. If in the actual movie, the character defeated the bad guys by “reversing the polarity of the neutron flow” then as a DM you’d better know what that means and why it works and what other options that wouldn’t have worked would be and communicate all that so that the players know what tools they have at their disposal. That’s not always easy to do in a way that feels consistent and dramatically satisfying. And while it makes all the difference to the players, the audience is usually unaware of it unless it becomes relevant, as much of that discussion happens before we record.

Galaxy Quest presents a wonderfully unique set of sci-fi-babble, since the aliens were literally trying to design something that imitated the tv show as accurately as possible. So that gives us a sci-fi language grounded in real science but dressed up in the most heightened of 90’s tv science vocabulary. It’s a blast.

Alright, back in a couple weeks with more GQ!