And maybe that’s the thing. BSG has the advantage of being serial fiction that beat the audience into assuming that the cavalry won’t come, or that if they do, they’ll break their neck or shoot themselves in the face or something.

I think my favorite cavalry scene is from Babylon 5… The station is about to get attacked by a fleet of Earth ships, and they are hopeless outnumbered… Until Delenn and a brand new fleet of ships gates in.

“This is Ambassador Delenn of the Minbari. Babylon 5 is under our protection. Withdraw, .. or be destroyed.” [in the White Star!]
“Negative. We have authority here. Do not force us to engage your ship.”
“Why not? Only one human captain has ever survived battle with a Minbari fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else.”

– Delenn and Captain Drake in Babylon 5:”Severed Dreams”

Oddly, I liked the Oliphant charge in ROTK best. Maybe I’m just eeevil.

Ooo, the bull charge in Rundown?

AFRO GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Although it’s a bit of a cheesy departure from the book, the scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when Sirius apparates behind Lucien and socks him is excellent. In the book, another good one is when the Order is losing that same battle, and Dumbledore strides in and shuts the Death Eaters down in one move.

Gandalf: “Rohirrim king fights alone.”
Eomer: “Not alone. ROHIRRIM!”

The impossible downhill charge (by actual CGI cavalry!) was so awesome, the rest of the fight was basically mopping up of the uruk hai horde. The Rohirrim tried this again in the third film… Only to get smacked around by war oliphaunts and the Nazgul.

JP is still my fav, though.

Revenge of the Nerds. The nerds have just found there house trashed by the Alphas and Gilbert (Anthony Edwards) decides he’s had enough and rushes to the rally to speak his mind. While trying to grab the microphone the Alphas start manhandling him and even ignore the dean when he tells them to stop.

As things look like they are hopeless and Gilbert looks like he’s going to be broken, help arrives. Bernie Casey and a bunch of Tri-Lambda alum show up.

I know it was playing on some stereotypes, but a dozen big, black angry men sure put a crimp on the jocks.

At the point in the manga when this takes place, Kira has amassed a bit of a following, and his unstoppable mass murders have cowed the police–only five of them are willing to work on the investigation. The stress of the situation has caused Chief Yagami to have a heart attack.

A TV station gets a message from someone claiming to be Kira, and airs it. Determined to put a stop to this, one of the police officers races to the station and is killed by the alleged Kira, who apparently only needs to see your face to kill you.

Chief Yagami, watching this on TV, leaves the hospital where he had been recuperating, and smashes into the TV station in an armored car to retrieve the tapes that Kira sent to the station. Meanwhile, two other policemen who arrived at the station are killed when they step out of their car. Yagami therefore can’t walk out of the building without being killed by Kira. But he is still instructed to boldly walk out the front door.

And outside that door are dozens of police officers in riot gear, with helmets hiding their faces, crouching down behind large shields. These officers, despite having seen three of their own die moments earlier, literally created a wall out of their own bodies to prevent Kira from being able to see Chief Yagami, so that he could walk to a car they had prepared for him and drive away safely.

I don’t think we were making fun. I’m pretty sure Syd had met McKee a few times, and it struck me that they believed their books might have been rivals in the marketplace but they and their work weren’t. I think that Syd’s jokes were more aimed at the perceived rivalry than at McKee.

When I took the class, Syd had a way of making a lot of things seem sound; he’s good in the way that he can talk about and even criticize ideas by talking more about why they probably don’t work than how wrong they are. For example: I’ve read a lot of people criticize his screenwriting theories as adhering to strictly to very specific structures, like the end of Act I on page 28 or something arbitrary like that. Which was why the class where he broke his own ideas became my favorite; I hate rules, for the most part, but he spent more time talking about how and why storytelling works and applying classical structures to stories. I think my biggest problem after taking the class, in fact, is that it made so much sense it’s hard for me, at times, to think of stories in any other way.