Battlestar Galactica - The Plan

In retrospect, amazing how much good will the brilliant first season earned. Even more amazing is how they expended it all and then some by the end of the fourth. Just for me at least the last season (and especially the last half of the last season) was all kinds of horrible.

On the one hand, good to hear that Dean Stockwell gets a decent amount of screen time, on the other hand it does sound like it confirms that Cavil did it all as opposed what I thought for a long time, which was the War came about due to a group consensus - even if Cavil was manipulating it, I thought he couldn't just make it happen, he had to talk the others into it. Once again, giving the show too much credit.

I am currently watching the 2nd season, intending to watch Razor at its proper point in the timeline... without spoilering whats to come (I watch it the first time), would you suggest watching "The Plan" now, or afterwards?

Speaking of unanswered questions:

Everyone should read the recent BSG: The Final Five comic series, written by TV series scribe Seamus Kevin Fahey. You get entire issues devoted to the Thirteenth Tribe's exodus from Kobol, the political situation on Kobol and how that planet was destroyed, what exactly led to the settlement of the Twelve Colonies, and life on Cylon Earth before the nuclear holocaust (all Ronald D. Moore-approved and canonical), but the big, gigantic bombshell revelation:

The Thirteenth Tribe (swipe to highlight) were all originally atheist humans who downloaded into mechanical "skinjob" Cylon bodies on Kobol via Resurrection technology, in an attempt to live forever. Saul Tigh's ancestor, Michael, was one of these humans, 4,000 years before the TV series.

And it ties straight into the events of The Plan -- this series was written concurrently with the upcoming movie, and supervised by RDM and Jane Espenson.

This series is vital stuff in terms of the official continuity, and absolutely required, canonical reading. For probably the first time since BSG premiered, we have a non-filmic storyline that is every bit as important as the filmed episodes/movies, and one that will have to be referred to from now on whenever someone asks, "What happened on Kobol?" or "How did the Thirteenth Tribe reach Earth?"

In other words, put this trade paperback on the shelf right next to your TV series Blu-Rays. It's that essential.

Well, kindly fuck you, producers. Nice to see that they tell the story that should have been told in the series in the first place in another fucking format. Great.

They basically did tell that story, via uninterrupted exposition from a brain-damaged Anders. It was one of the most glaring flaws of the last season.

Yeah, I first thought about Andersons exposition dump as well. And I agree about that being a glaring flaw indeed. Hence my disdain for putting it out in detail again in comic book form.

ETA: To clarify, I wouldn´t have a problem doing comics EU style. But using these to iron out the short comings of the series itself is just shitting the bed for me. Especially if it will be used as an argument for the brilliant writing on the series down the road. "See, in issue 27 that is all explained! Again! But with pretty pictures this time! And everything makes sense now! Hooray"

There's much more to it than you might think -- we don't even see the Final Five themselves until issue #3 (apart from The Plan-lead-in framing story). The first two issues are devoted to showing us life on Kobol involving their ancestors a couple thousand years before the Fightin' Tighs were even born on Earth. Also, the prophet Pythia's life and her efforts to warn the people of Kobol about what was coming is covered in detail.

Also, like I said, there are some nice, character-driven twists to what Anders told us on the show -- for example, Sam helps "develop" Resurrection technology in Ellen's lab, but he was a homeless, guitar-playing vagrant whom Tyrol recruited in some back alley as their first download guinea-pig test subject. (He gets shot by Tory during the lab experiment, interestingly. And her boyfriend Galen isn't too keen on her by-any-means-necessary scientific "methods," to say the least.)

The back two issues show us what caused the nuclear holocaust on Earth in greater detail, as well as the Fives' sub-FTL journey from Old Earth to the algae planet to Kobol to the Twelve Colonies, where they end the war, etc. Some of that might've been doable in flashback form on the TV series, but it showing everything in all four issues would've been both time-consuming and hideously expensive.

Personally, I was always more interested in the Kobol-stuff than the Final Five-stuff before picking this up, but it's all handled quite well. When you read it, you realize that there was no possible way this all could've gotten made for the TV show without derailing the main plot for a good two or three episodes, minimum. We only got a couple of quick TV flashbacks to Old Earth (Tyrol walking down the street, looking up, and seeing the flash; Saul and Ellen in the lobby of their apartment building) -- this series shows exactly what led up to those moments, but this was probably the only means of expanding that story without knocking the TV show way off-course in the process.

Review, and some great screen grabs:

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Battle...y-Review/6375/

Nice review. My appetite is whetted.

That's another big thing the comic series shows us that The Plan evidently doesn't -- we get to see the Cylon model Daniel, and Cavil's murder of him. (Like I said, though, both projects were written in tandem.)

Can't wait for this one.

I agree with Tati, this is definitely the Brother Cavil show. I really think it should be renamed to "The Revelation".

Spoiler Alert:





It is basically semi-explains Cavil's plan but then goes on to show most of the Cylon's changing of their opinion of Humans, Capricorn Brother Cavil included. The only Cyclon who does not change is the BSG Brother Cavil.

It was an OK watch, but no revelations as I had anticipated by the name.

Its' not terrible, but it's pretty ill-conceived. The movie doesn't seem to figure out what the heck it's about for a while. And the title is useless, since the film essentially reveals that the Cylon plan was to kill all humans in the initial attacks and that everything else that happened was them trying to mop up.

There's good stuff in here - I liked seeing the evolution of the way the Cylons changed their thinking, and I liked the different Cavills - but they spend too much time weaving it in and out of the series. They should have just figured out a story that was a story, and not a minor spackling of holes. And this is a minor, minor spackling, since I feel like it doesn't address much of the stuff that bothered me. In fact, the revelation that ALL of the Final Five survived the initial attack by accident was irritating, and silly even in the movie's context, for it showed that the Cylons were ready for the Five to resurrect. At the very least they could have done SOMETHING with Tory, since her history was blank. She should have died on Caprica, been resurrected and smuggled into the fleet. Something. Anything.

This sounds pretty terrible. I guess I'll Netflix it at some point. Such a shame, this show was so good once upon a time.

Do they finally explain why the Cylons would torture Tigh on New Caprica and pop his eye ball out, or that another one of those messy points we were never supposed to think too much about?

Wasn't that because they suspected he was a leader or at least part of the insurgency? Or did that spring up afterwards?

It was simply Cavil being the sadist that he is -- torturing one of his creators for no other reason than that he could. I don't need any other explanation for that one.

"No more Mr. Nice Gaius"...someone tell me Baltar DOESN'T say this...AGAIN!

Reviewed: http://chud.com/articles/articles/21...LAN/Page1.html

Is the whole thing supposed to be a spoiler, Devin? I gotta swipe to read any of it.

Weird. Think I fixed it.

Yep, fixed for me. Pretty average review, but I'm okay with average I guess. I probably will get it just to be a completist.