Should I Watch Battlestar Gallatica? - Page 2

Exactly Stelios. And most of the main characters lost someone in the intial attack. The Adamas' lost a mother and a wife and had only buried Lee's brother a year earlier.

It wasn't meant to be an escapist fantasy like the original, or a sterile, sexless pc world like NEXT GENERATION. In fact, I find it hard to believe Moore wrote both shows!

All that said, it's obviously ridiculous to expect that some in the audience won't grow tired of that feeling. It just can't be sustained. Not that I'm saying they should have comedic episodes, that isn't this kind of show, but still, problems with the tone is a fair enough complaint for a viewer that watched the show over the course of four fucking years. Of course it's going to lose some people.

I remember reading somewhere that the executives Sci Fi asked Moore to pepper some lighter scenes in the show. So, Moore wrote a birthday party scene that took place in the hanger, and capped it with a Viper crashing and killing a bunch of people. That was apparently the last time Sci Fi brought that subject up.

A good way to handle executive suggestions.

Personally, I found the uniform reaction to tragedy to be contrary to the ultra-realistic tone they were going for. In the real world, not everyone reacts to trauma by drinking themselves blind, verbally or physically assaulting a loved one, and attempting suicide. These scenes happened so often in BSG that at some point, they stopped having their desired effect on me; instead of empathizing, I just signed, or laughed. Like the later seasons of Buffy, for me BSG at some point stopped trying to tell a dark story and started just trying really hard to be dark. In an effort to be taken seriously, they ended up heaping so much angst on all of their characters that I felt a disconnect and simply stopped caring about them.

I found the amount of angst to be somewhat realistic, keeping in mind we were supposed to be watching a military ship. Now that I think about it, a lot of the civilian characters seemed to me to have a brighter outlook and be generally less angsty, not counting terrorists factions.

I can see how a lot of people would feel like watching the show became a droll grind. And I did kind of miss some of the levity that seemed to permeate the show earlier on.

Also, Dirk Benedict rants about how much he hates Ronald D. Moore's BSG. Again.

If that isn't reason enough to give the new version a try, there's little hope for you as a functional, well-adjusted human being.

Jesus Christ. What an efficient way to enable insecure, misogynistic fanboy rage. I also like how his ego prevents him to understand what a cameo is when discussing the A-TEAM movie.

The old show was pure shit, but the new BSG was great, until the supernatural elements came to the forth, and the whole "destiny" thing overrode the character development we had until the escape from New Caprica.

After that, it went off the rails, pretty much like Lost did in this season. But BSG somewhat managed to salvage that season (3-1/2-4-1/2) with a nice ending run and a great finale.

Yeah, Crossroads is one of my favorite episodes. It really makes up for some of the crap episodes like the health care episode or the one with Bulldog. The boxing episode is GREAT, fuck the haters.

The Carl Lumbly episode is actually one of my favorites from that season. Ties together rather nicely with the "plague" two-parter that came immediately beforehand, and in a pretty clever, subtle fashion, too.

As for Dirk Benedict, however...like Orson Scott Card, the man grows more and more batshit insane with each passing year. He's a misogynist of the first order. If anyone happens to own the 2003 mini-series DVD, just play the Sci-Fi Channel making-of documentary, and fast-forward to the part where he and Katee Sackhoff have coffee together (at a Starbuck's, natch).

It's plainly obvious that he's been out of the loop during the whole run-up to the Ronald D. Moore version, and he's clearly discomfited by the thought of a "girl" playing his macho, pussy-hound character. But when Katee then tells him that Boomer is also played by a female actor (along with Mary McDonnell having such a strong role in the series), the look of mounting, barely-contained horror on his face is just unsettlingly creepy, yet utterly glorious, to behold.

(Reportedly, he then went completely China Syndrome-apeshit just a couple years later, after Michelle Forbes appeared on the show in the Cain-role.)

On BSG, though, the supernatural influence has always been there, right from the very first season.

How did Baltar miraculously guess the correct location of the tylium refinery? How did he know about the presence of the scientist onboard the Olympic Carrier before Roslin herself did? How did he know about the nature of the Cylon transponder beneath the DRADIS console, and how to finger Doral as a skinjob agent? How did "Watchtower" magically reappear in various artists' heads throughout the ages? How did Derek miraculously get cured? How is Head Six able to physically affect Baltar throughout the series, and even lift and carry him around in Seasons 1, 2, and 4?

In "Home, Part II" (early in the second season), Head Six even outright tells Baltar that she's an "angel in the service of God," and then people got all butthurt at the end of the series when this actually turned out to be true. Go fig.

Besides, it's not like BSG is the first work to ever operate like this. Has Tolkien ever explained in intricate detail precisely how Gandalf was resurrected, beyond the allegorical aspects presented in the dialogue?

The religious shit was interesting when viewed as a way to give hope to the hopeless, or if you interpret the visions as being evidence that Baltar's guilt has driven him insane (nearly every "message" could be interpreted as his really smart subconscious figuring things out).

When the religious metaphors and messages turned out to be literally true, it was really lame, because, like, there's no such thing as gods/angels/demons/supernatural entities, so it cheapens a series that we like to think of as taking place in a "real" place.

Though, on balance, it's still probably far better than the original explanation Ron Moore had written for the series bible -- i.e., Head Six literally being an implanted Cylon chip in Baltar's head.

Also:

A 2006 article Dirk Benedict wrote for Dreamwatch magazine:

"Starbuck: Lost in Castration."

This discussion seems to have gone pretty far afield from helping non-viewer(s) decide if they should watch the show.

I already answered that question a while back. I assume non-viewers stopped reading after they received the information they needed.

Yeah, I have to hope no one curious about seeing the show for the first time read past the first page. Maybe there should be a proper BSG Post-mortem thread to hash this stuff out?

That was exactly why I quite liked it. Giving supernatural happenings rational explanations is what sci-fi always does, so having it turn out to be true in such a gritty, down-to-earth (as much as that term can apply to a fucking space opera) show was a striking move. Can't help wondering if some people who disliked that development were just disappointed that the show didn't flatter their real-life worldview on the subject. And as if the show's mythology wasn't convoluted enough, I dread to think what contrived explanation they'd have cooked up to explain away all that stuff Leto mentioned.

It takes place in a universe where God is real. As an atheist, I don't see why this is particularly bothersome. If I can accept that these people are living on space ships and fighting robots that look like humans, I can also accept the concept of God.

Exactly. And even shows like Babylon 5 dealt on a regular basis with exploring God and religion, despite the creator/lead writer being an avowed atheist.

Along with major written SF works like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series dealing to a good extent with religion, as well as A Canticle for Leibowitz, Gather Darkness, and others. Same thing with Robert J. Sawyer's hard SF novels The Terminal Experiment and Calculating God, attempting to discover scientific proof of the existence of God. Hell, there's an entire tradition of written SF tackling this subject, from Olaf Stapledon's The Star Maker, to Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and Frank Herbert's Dune novels; from James Blish's A Case of Conscience, to Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God.

As further evidence that religion wasn't something simply tacked on by Moore in the later seasons of the show, there's the podcast commentary for "Downloaded" in the second season -- Ronald D. Moore outright refers to the Head characters as divine beings who are interfering with the lives of mortals for as-yet-unfathomable reasons.

So, the intent to use the supernatural as a major element of the series' plot was always there right from the get-go, or at least certainly long before the "back" two seasons ever went into production (contrary to the popular fandom-meme).

Can I take this moment to emphasize what a great "Woah" moment it was during Downloaded when it was revealed Six had Baltar in her head?

I don't mind having God on the show. But when character development goes down the drain and then have everything explained on the show as a deus ex machina, then it's lazy writing. It's weird, as Moore often stated that he hated writers doing just that and tried to ground BSG..

Leto II, I agree with Dirk Benedict, the original Lt. Starbuck about Ron D. Moore's terrible version, of Glen A. Larson's Classic Series...Battlestar Galactica. He is of course upset about...The A-Team, because he only has a small appearance in it.

So, should I take my 'revelations' from my new experience with this show to a different thread? a new thread? I just watched the mini-series and loved it. The totality of it is great. The end's reveal of 4 of the 12 Cylon models was excellent.

I watched the mini-series through Season 3 (part 1) on DVD/On Demand, then finished in real time. I don't know what makes me so bitter when other shows have done similar things, but this show went from brilliant to piece-of-shit. It was just a drastic decline, especially at a time around when The Wire and The Shield stuck the landing like few long-running TV shows ever have.

The biggest problem was characterization. To excuse comparisons to The Shield, that show had an amazing degree of character consistency and through-lines. This is exactly what BSG lacked. Character motivations jumped back and forth whenever it was convenient for the plot. You can see it on a macro scale with the Cylons as a race, and it worked up through the beginning of season 3, but it flip-flops enough times and they might as well change their name to Teva.

That said, I say watch it. Quit halfway through Season 3 (or 1/4 way through) and you will not miss anything. You'll get two great long-form arcs and a stellar start. Maybe that was the problem. The writers could never craft anything as tense and desperate as "33."

Eh, some other things that don't really exist in the show include:

Faster than Light Travel

A drug you can take in a shot that prevents radiation from killing you

Humans in Vipers that can outfight robot fighters with (one would assume) reaction times measured in micro-seconds.

Also Moore hints that the Cylon God is simply some sort of evolved Human or Alien ("He doesn't like to be called that", the fact that God actively manipulates humans via lies and in one case a brand new Viper). Hopefully that's "Scientific" enough for you.

I do agree that the ambiguity was more interesting than the leadup, and that Moore & Co kind of dropped the ball with the Mysticism...

I like the way you look at this. Of all the things that bothered me about the last two seasons of BSG, the concept of the mysticism/religious themes was not. Anything that was botched was in the execution. Take a look at Kings for a show that takes the concept of a real God, puts it in an even more realistic world, and makes it work. If they could do it, there's no reason that Battlestar Galactica, with all of its science-so-advanced could not.

The thing about the ending is, it didn't even make ANY sense.
I mean, even putting aside the god_awful Deus-Ex-Machina thing - and my, could Moore have been more literal with it... - what the fuck is the issue with the different races at the end? I mean in Galactica we see a fully developed racial mix. Then, it is implied that people are scattered on Earth, but in a random manner, so the racial mix should still be present. Instead, the different, basic human races develop again in different places.
And if anything, they should have ALL ended up in Greece, judging by the Pantheon and all!
Similar arguments could be made for the status of the women (where did parity between sexes go?) and a whole lot of other issues.
Funny thing is, I always knew they were going to mess with Earth's past. I just didn't expect it to be handled SO badly.
Also, they were so intent on making it bleak and dark till the end, that they even took the time to kill off the few surviving and likable minor characters, like Racetrack. I mean, is there even a point in taking it all to such extremes?

It truly was an awful clusterfuck of an ending to behold.

The way I saw it SPOILER
It's the exact same thing as the original "humans" who were infact descendants of cylons but after a long time they forgot who they were and ended up creating a new version of cylons while thinking of themselves as humans. The same idea sort of applies here. And besides I don't think we are supposed to believe that these few people were the ones to entirely seed life on earth, we saw primitive humans in the finale too.

I hope so. I imagine someone seeing the thread title and thinking, "Hmm, should I watch BSG?", clicking the thread, seeing a discussion of the finale and deciding, "Well, now I guess I don't need to see it!"

It seems like using the BSG thread that already exists, or starting a new post-mortem thread would be better. But hey, I'm the guy who wouldn't recommend the show - if the fans of the show want to lay a spoiler-filled trap, feel free.

This thread stopped having anything to do with the OP ten replies in.

You confusing science-fiction with mysticism in those first examples. I liked the ambiguity, but when God is behind everything, it took away the human element from the show. Simple as that.

I sort of agree (more with regards to the Starbuck resolution than the Head stuff), but I think the human element took most of the damage from the "everyone's a cylon" nature of the last season rather than the mysticism. When the show was about human beings struggling through the direst of scenarios, it was compelling stuff. When it became about everyone retreading ground we went over with Boomer in the early seasons, it got repetitive and kind of dull. Not to mention confusing, since baseline consistency required that the last ones be fundamentally different from the original models, and I never got a real handle on what exactly that meant. Most of the time, they seemed to be riding on the existing "skinjob" development/characterization, but the plot kept reminding us that they really weren't much like them at all.

Anyway, the Final Five stuff is what bothers me more about the last season than the God. That bothered me a bit with Starbuck, where it felt like covering a big plot hole first and a thematic point second. But as far as Head Six/Baltar go, while I preferred the ambiguity, the resolution was fine. But getting back to the human element, by far the most effective part of that storyline was Baltar's realization that he was going to end up a farmer after all. That it worked more or less independently of any (sci-fi or mystical) mumbo-jumbo is fairly telling. See also: the mutiny arc, the strongest part of S4, and was more about the impossibility of forcing reconciliation than any particulars of the cylon technology that were the direct catalyst.

This.

As the series clearly established, there were already primitive, parallel-evolved humans living on Earth long before the Colonials ever arrived -- i.e., the ones who sprang up here from apes millions of years earlier.

As we saw in the closing half-hour or so of the series, Adama "seeded" Colonial settlements all across the planet, including in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. However, our own human fossil record on those continents doesn't go back nearly as far as 150,000 years ago. The big death likely came around 75,000 B.C., when the Toba supervolcano erupted. Most of those colonies would've been wiped out at that point, with only the African-descended humans surviving.

While it isn't 100% clear, the scientific evidence suggests a catastrophic, near-extinction-level event. Homo sapiens was brought down to somewhere around 2,000 people. Total. In the entire world. Depending on how big the population was beforehand, this could easily have ended quite a few matrilineal lines. This was an explosion equivalent to at least 1 teraton of TNT. That's a thousand billion tons of TNT, 20,000 times the power of the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. It had to be as much luck as anything else for our species to have survived.

Assuming that Earth history takes its known course after the Colonials and Cylons settled here, they eventually interbred to some extent among the existing population, with those descendants possessing nominal hybrid-vigor, going from the show's implication about Hera's genetic line.

And it doesn't bother you a bit that identical life forms have developed in different planets, light years apart?
This is exactly the kind of nonsense I am talking about.
To make another example, remember that Earth humans, though starting seemingly from scratch, are going to develop EXACTLY the same technology again, right down to the models of the cars!!!
But of course, there's God, so I guess they can get away with it all, cram it all there without bothering to think about reason or logic for 2 seconds.

This has to be the epitome of lazy writing.
I mean, I know it's everyone's favorite sport to blame the execs, but this is the one time I genuinely wonder where they were.
How comes no one stopped Moore for a second and asked him "What the hell is wrong with you, sir? What the HELL is this? We're talking Tim Burton's Planet of Apes levels of nonsense here, possibly worse!"

And again, the tone of the ending was "icing on the cake of disaster".
What was the point of it? Didn't we deserve at least some relief for some of the characters we invested so much in?
I mean, I can take a sad ending.
I just finished my run through Six Feet Under, and I guarantee my eyes were more than watery at the end: because it was sad, but ARTFUL, MEANINGFUL and brilliant.
What do we have here instead: a pretentious writer who didn't know what he was doing and who once again wanted to prove his "seriousness" by shrouding the ending in a pointlessly and overly bleak tone.
Oh my, I guess I've spent enough time complaining already.
But it really was a terrible disappointment, after 4 years.

Then you've missed one of the major thematic points of the entire series, which is that art and culture and technology and civilization itself can happen because the universe needs them to happen. So "Watchtower" can spontaneously fall into Sam Anders' head, followed by Kara's father's head, and then can reemerge in Bob Dylan's head 150,000 years later. We're speaking the same language as the Colonials, separated by an unfathomable gulf of time, this time known as "English." We still have blazers and strip clubs and Air Force One today, because -- in many respects -- their culture did survive and re-emerge.

This theme was established all the way back in the mini-series: "All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again."

And, as someone else pointed out above, technically "unrealistic" too are FTL travel, artificial gravity, and kill-crazy robotic soldiers, but few people actually take issue with those elements being present in the series. In fact, if you look at some of the more unconventional ideas presented in written speculative fiction/SF over the past 60 or 70 years, the notion of the English language and "All Along the Watchtower" recurring throughout history is really entirely in keeping with this sequence of extrapolation and world-building.

It's certainly far less radical than it appears on the surface, if you're a longtime reader of prose SF.

Hey guys! Lets' take it to another thread!

Yes, but I never thought it had to be taken so literally.
And, since the evidence from the natural world goes exactly in the opposite direction, Moore should have at least given an explanation for this circularity thing, I mean other than "God wills it!"
If this was the level of reasoning I expected from a TV show, I'd sooner listen to the rants of some tele-preacher (but hey, since they don't import those in Europe, I guess Galactica remains the only way to go after all...)
Ok, enough, I'll stop here