Battlestar Galactica Reconsidered

I actually had the opposite reaction on re-watch. Even though I know that they wrote the series in a pretty slipshod manner, the way that the later seasons call back to little things in earlier seasons almost makes me believe that they did have it planned out ahead of time.

I especially like how things that were almost certainly decisions on the part of the actor eventually become important elements of the character, like in the episode right after 'Colonial Day' in Season 1 when Baltar is at the card game all drunk and jealous because Starbuck said Lee's name when he was frakking her, his accent is completely different. And then two seasons later when he's in prison he reveals that he was born on Tauron (iirc) and his regular Caprican accent is just a put-on, and he shifts to the same accent. And then that sort of snowballs into the flashbacks with his father in the finale, which subtly alters our understanding of his relationship with Six and possibly why she saved Baltar's life in the attack.

A lot of people fell into the geek trap of expecting a 'clever' resolution. Instead Moore told us: "You know that god everyone kept going on about being the one controlling everything? Guess what. He exists. Surprise!" I was surprised and puzzled at first but in the end I'm very much OK with it. BSG at its core was more concerned with metaphysical and philosophical questions than space opera. What makes a human? What is the point of existence? If god truly exists, how does someone's destiny measure against his free will? It had its share of wham bang moments, of political intrigue and romance but these weren't what this show was about.

That's what ultimately made me pleased with how Moore handled the endgame, despite it going against all my personal ideals.

Dirk just won't shut the fuck up. He's getting tons of A-Team press right now.

I only post this new article link because it's so awesomely mesmerizing -- like rubbernecking a traffic accident:

Benedict pisses all over the new BSG...yet again.

What's the matter, Dirk? They didn't offer you a role like they did Hatch?

Back in the first season, an early draft of "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II" featured a potential role intended for Dirk -- the personification of "God," that Baltar and Head Six would presumably encounter in the Opera House -- but they ended up doing a rewrite on it (probably ticked off by his comments).

Benedict:

"They took a shitty show, and made it great. HOW DARE THEY!"

Has anybody checked on Herbert Jefferson to see if he's OK with Boomer being a girl in the new version?

Shhhhh. He's busy.

I'd love to check out Dirk's T.V. A dinosaur's set must be gigantic.

I don't know if I'd go that far. In fact, I think Moore went out of his way not to be absolutist. He argues for the existence of a force/being that we don't understand, but doesn't conclude it's necessarily metaphysical. Any series that ends with the words:

HEAD SIX: That too is in God's plan.
HEAD BALTAR: You know It doesn't like to be called that.

... isn't drawing conclusions.

Well, of course it is. 'Cause you know what happens. That feeling of "OMG how will they get off of New Caprica!?!?!?!?" won't be replicated.

If you (like most) didn't appreciate Galactica's final season, this may explain why you and others hated it and I didn't. I love that the final season expanded our understanding of the Cylons and allowed more empathy towards them. People who would've preferred them to be more like Skynet probably wouldn't like that. Season 4 revealed that the Cylons weren't an evil force that deserved to be annihilated, but were mostly tricked into their hatred. That togetherness was possible and preferable. The show started off as Dick Cheney and ended up Barack Obama.

I think the finale will gain favor in time. Hell, after Lost's, it's already looking good, innit?

I really didn't mind the "humanizing" of the Cylons. A shift in perspective isn't a bad thing, so long as it doesn't retroactively render the earlier narrative inconsistent. Unfortunately, my complaint with the final season (which I generally liked) is that it really did feel like they went into the series with no clear-cut plan, concocted the backstory late in the game, and just painted over the rough patches.

Granted, they did a remarkable job of covering those patches, but they're noticeable. It would have been nice if they'd worked out their backstory ahead of time, though. Retconning is always awkward.

I loved the finale and the series, but the last season was a mess. Up until that point there were only a couple bad episodes, and at least half of the last season was worthless or pretty fucking terrible. I'm still not sure what they were trying to do with the Bummer Earth stuff. In a show that was already bleak, what was the point in taking it further?

The finale redeemed most of it for me, but the reveal of the final four and Starbuck's return was such a high point, and they really had no idea what to do with it.

ETA: It goes without saying that the mutiny episodes were incredible. Zarek's last moment is classic.

Oh yes. That run of episodes found a propulsive forward momentum that the show hadn't seen since the first season. Once that storyline came to an end, the show suddenly felt as if it were already over.

The mutiny should have taken up more episodes. But what there was was fantastic, and some of the best stuff of the series. "I AM COMING FOR ALL OF YOU."

Actually, Head Baltar says "You know, it doesn't like to be called that. Silly me. Silly, silly me." CUT TO: Crazy robot montage!

I know it has a proper title and all, but in my head the finale is called ROWBUTZ!!!!, Pt. 2.

Beat me to it, Scott. It was clear that Moore at the very end refused to give in 100% completely to the "deus ex machina" impulses so many have (inaccurately) accused him of yielding to, and was leaving the door open for "God" possibly being some type of evolved alien force nudging events along -- the RDM version of the "Ship of Lights," perhaps.

That ambiguity right there has since made the whole ending much more valid for me, despite the reservations I had during the initial broadcast.


Believe it or not, given Benedict's past several incoherent rants, I think here he's actually referring to the rise of feminism in recent decades -- and how basically sputtering with impotent rage he is over the fact that the new BSG would dare to recast several of the major roles of the original show (Starbuck, Boomer, Cain) with females, and have them turn out to be even "stronger" characters than their predecessors.

He's actually fucking threatened by this.

Which is all the more strange, frankly, considering that the original show featured -- if I'm not mistaken -- an entire freaking storyline dedicated to training a whole wing of women Viper pilots, to say nothing of the Sheba character, who flew fighters and kicked Cylon ass (and was the daughter of Lloyd Bridges' Cain) right alongside Hatch and Benedict themselves.

Yet he never mentions this at all, ever, and apparently is more than willing to give a total free pass to the original show's blatant stupidities, rampant lack of story logic, and wasted opportunities.

The main different between the original BSG and the Ronald D. Moore reboot lies in the source material. Moore realized that, as dumb as the original show was, with its space discos, flowing capes, and pyramids, there was still promise in the intital premise, with its underlying themes of genocide and terror. Yet the Duke Fleeds and Dirk Benedicts of the world will continue to hail the Glen Larson show as some kind of high-art masterpiece, and the new show to be "nihilistic," and without "hope" or "jaunty fun."

Give me dysfunction and nihilism any day.

Say what you will about space discos, but damn if the original pilot didn't have a really far out musical number sang by a three faced whatsit that was more creative than any of the music in the newer series.

20 minutes later... I couldn't find youtube of it. But it totally kicked ass!

Also, you guys are making me feel totally indiscriminate in my tastes, because I unabashedly loved BSG through all four seasons. It had pew-pew AND existential dread. Commentary on terrorism, xenophobia, religion vs. spirituality and ROBOTS. The only thing it was missing was a karate-wielding chimp.

The BSG finale holds together a lot better than the Lost finale did. Both left a bunch of unanswered questions, but BSG didn't waste half of its last season on a narrative device that ultimately had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the series.

In my post I wasn't talking about an 'actual' god, hence the non capitalization of the word. I actually have some fanwaknky theories of my own as to what this force controlling everyone was, but that's the atheist, hard sci-fi fan in me speaking.

Yeah, Benedicts a complete embarrassment. I mean...

If the guy can't find "morals, spirituality, love and hope" among all that "dysfunction, despair and disenchantment", he really is blind.

The stuff with Earth 1 and 2, I think, underlines the hopeful, secular side of the finale people perhaps bypass. Humanity essentially makes their own heaven after finding out the the "real", religious one is a bunch of B.S. The discovery of the Final Five's Earth serves much the same purpose as The Mist's ending -- sure, it's bleak as Hell, but the message is to persevere no matter how bad things get, that a better future could be around the corner and you just don't know it.

This is exactly what I liked so much about it. It left the existence of its god open, but mankind, having been let down by prophecy, took control of their destiny. In the end, it didn't matter whether their gods, or the one god, were really there. They built their own future.

Dirk Benedict is allowed to have his opinion, about...Classic Battlestar Galactica! He is right, the original series a...Glen A. Larson production, was a family show. There was some shades of grey, as some Colonial Politicians were greedily stealing from starving refugees. The series was mostly about overcoming a great tragedy, because of the faith of their leader Commander Adama. The new series is what Moore, wanted it to be a more realistic, political drama. I do...Hate, the new version. I love the original vipers, with their laser cannons, the more attractive leading ladies of the 70's original with...Jane Seymour, Anne Lockhart, Maren Jensen, Laurette Spang, Sarah Rush, and guest actresses like...Melody Anderson and Britt Eckland. I also prefer all the other things that Moore hates...Space Clothes, laser pistols, a disco soundtrack composed by Stu Phillips, and of course the original Lt. Starbuck Dirk Benedict, Lt. Boomer Herbert Jefferson Jr., Colonel Tigh Terry Carter, and the Legendary Commander Cain...Lloyd Bridges!

Despite sending Starbuck back along with ethereal Music that ends up being coordinates that lead to a habitable planet. I like the ending and all, but they definitely got help from that third party.

Considering she also got the location for Earth from a song her dad played when she was 6 and replayed when he was another "angel", they got quite a bit of help from quasi-God

This was an example of them trading practical "realism" for aesthetic "realism", and I think it was a good idea. Despite the Galactica itself obviously being far more advanced than anything we have on Earth, the show had an old fashioned, broken down air about it's technology. Lasers, I think, would have clashed with that sensibility, straying too far into the kind of slick Sci-Fi they tried to avoid. Everything had an analog feel, stuff you imagine would have been thrown in the junk pile upon better circumstances. Atmosphere took priority, and I can't really argue with that decision.

Absolutely can't argue with that.

I didn't catch the series till I watched the DVD's: began Season One shortly after the show actually ended its run, and watched the whole thing in a pretty concentrated form (aside from Firefly, it's probably the only high-profile series from the last few years that I've done that with).

From that, I found Seasons One and Two to be pretty headlong great storytelling, but things began to fall apart for me after that. I don't know what it was like watching a week at a time, but getting it all in a concentrated dose really emphasized a latter-seasons lack of storytelling direction (particularly once the revelation about Tigh and the others hits). I never lost interest, but that's the point at which, for me, the show gets way too "on the nose" about its speechifying, and way too vauge about what it thinks it all means. I kept thinking of Life of Brian: "Oh, he's making it up as he goes along!"

And I was pretty disappointed in the finale, not because of whether or not God was part of it, but because it felt like a completely unearned feel-good wrapup that (very much like Lost) jettisoned anything resembling logic or intellectual rigor to show us some pretty pictures (just for starters: virtually every key player in the series survives to the end, and the ones that don't get to live happily ever after do get to transcend mundane life and move on -- and short of something like The Wire, I'd be hard pressed to think of a series whose premise demanded a few significant losses along the way more than BSG's did).

Like Lost, it's a show that only disappoints in that it set the bar incredibly high when it began (and of the two, I'll take BSG's compromised vision over Lost's; it's certainly going to prove more rewatchable to me in years to come).

And, yes, the mutiny was played out perfectly, though I agree they could have easily stretched it another episode without losing the tension.

This is your brain on Stu Phillips:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98IzIOByhTk

This is your brain on Duke Fleed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7G4n_7rCoY

BONUS! Fleed is right, Ron Moore ruined BSG:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p9UiY_DdCo

Litmus Configuration, The gals in...Moore's Battlestar are ok.

Hmmm...the 1978 BSG vs. the 2003 BSG...

Laser turrets versus railguns firing armor-piercing, fragmentation, or explosive rounds. Wouldn't that pretty much depend on the comparative penetration abilities of a laser turret versus a railgun? (To say nothing of the comparative toughness of various types of hull armor.)

The old BSG forces probably win this one handily. Their energy weapons mostly disintegrate enemy fighters within one or two hits. New BSG flechette guns realistically tear a target apart at the cost of fifty or sixty rounds per second.

Old BSG Vipers had sophisticated targeting systems which allowed them to lock onto their targets and track their fire onto them. New Vipers have to spray-and-pray. (Not unlike actual, real-life fighter pilots.)

Old Vipers clearly had uber-tech inertial dampeners, and yet somehow strangely maneuvered like atmosphere-bound aircraft in the atmosphere-free vacuum of space. New Vipers seem to suffer from real-world physics limitations, similar to Star Furies from Babylon 5. A single old-style Viper could also completely destroy a capital ship (well, at least as long as it was flown by Lloyd Bridges).

The old Battlestar Galactica has all sorts of offensive and defensive weaponry, including the mystical, almost Jesus-like ability to singlehandedly shoot down an entire nuclear war's worth of ICBMs. And big-ass, basestar-bustin' missiles. The new BSG is incapable of shooting down missiles coming at it, unless it realistically sets up a flak-suppression engagement zone along a predetermined perimeter.

In short, Commander Adama, Lord of Kobol, handily defeats Commander Adama, washed-up museum relic, due to his use of highly-implausible, scientifically-inaccurate Cylon-killin' magical fairy technology. And if you're pitting the Pegasus, lead by Lloyd "Shoot-From-the-Hip" Bridges, against the new Galactica, then the new Galactica simply gets raped. Unless you're Michelle "Cylon-Rapetrain" Forbes. (Because her crew literally rapes Cylons, see.)

Also, in terms of interesting related reading, Dr. Kevin Grazier, the new BSG's science advisor, wrote up the following piece for his tech-blog:

Projectile Weapons vs. Directed Energy Weapons

Is the obsession with realism a post-9/11 thing? Or was it brewing before that? Don't get me wrong, I think it's important to strive for realism whenever it serves the characters and story. But some people seem kind of hung up on it nowadays, to the point where imagination and creativity are suffocated simply because things "wouldn't be that way" in reality.

It's cool. Agreed, though, about the slight magazine-size discrepancies between the caliber of rounds fired by the Colonial Vipers, and the available storage room in the spaceframe.

That one episode in particular dealing with the "conscientious objectors" sabotaging the ammo showed some some pretty sizeable rounds under manufacture.


Yeah, "continuity pornographers" is how one prominent recent-SF TV showrunner described that particular incestuous nerd-subclique a few years back -- obsessed to the point of sociopathy with the stupidest geek minutiae, at the expense of decent storytelling.

The day an Imperial Klingon Warrior Training Academy opens its doors in my neighborhood will also be a day that I happily open the doors of my gun cabinet.

Ammo for a rail gun is very easy to come by they just sold copper, iron or Aluminum. Really any conductive metal will work. Iron the easier to find, and copper is denser( meaning the energy in a built will be greater). Really no reason to use Aluminum, if you got copper or iron. They would probable use iron in a pinch and copper when they find it, but they can always easily make more built. Rail gun built would be easier to make then a jacketed pistol round you can buy in any gun store now.

If your rail gun is big enough and powerful enough each round, it fires is like getting hit by a nuke, or worse.

They only touched on it lightly in a couple of episodes, but a fully functioning battlestar is essentially a self-sufficient war factory, with food and water recycling facilities, and fighter and ammo production facilities. There was a mention in 'Scar' about them getting the Viper manufacturing facility on Pegasus working, which was why they had to stick around in that asteroid field mining ore, and there was the episode in S2 when the Cylon sympathisers were sabotaging bullets in the ammo factory.

Galactica had to go to Ragnar Anchorage to pick up ammo and supplies in the beginning because it had been mostly decommissioned and they didn't have to time to get the facilities up and running to go on the offensive as originally planned. Ragnar was also meant to resupply an entire fleet, and Galactica took absolutely everything they could carry, so they had a pretty freaking massive starting supply of ammunition.

I don't know if it's really the same thing... sure, Star Wars has a broken down, lived-in vibe about it, but I'd lump it in more with the "slick" Sci-Fi of Flash Gordon than the more Trekky vibe of Galactica. It's even been argued that Star Wars isn't sci-fi at all, just fantasy with machines (fanta-sci?).

The Centurions and Raiders as their own factions within Cylon society was an intriguing notion I wish they had done more with. Would've been more interesting than he umpteen iterations of "shit, I'm a skinjob, time to mope" that take up the majority of the final season.

Really, anything more with Centurions would've been awesome by default. Giant killer robots kind of defy criticism.

I think the main reason they didn't run with that plot is they didn't have the money to give Centurions more screen time. Sad but true.

BSG: First Cylon War Spinoff Officially a "Go."

Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome will focus on Young Adama (the Nico Cortez character from Razor) during the First Cylon War, and will be a webisode series (10 episodes long), with each episode around 10 minutes in length, and could possibly spin off into a full-fledged weekly TV series if it does well enough.

Michael Taylor will be the head writer, and says that the series will be very gritty and "Hurt Locker"-oriented in tone -- and because the episodes are slated for Internet release instead of basic cable broadcast, there will be "R"-rated blood, nudity, and violence (stuff they couldn't do before, except in the extended cuts of the movies, as well as some titties in the very first Razor Flashback episode).

It's probably no accident that 100 minutes is the perfect length for Universal to re-edit the individual episodes into a feature-length movie, and broadcast it on Syfy and/or release on Blu-Ray and DVD down the road. This is undoubtedly part of their thinking in greenlighting this...it'd basically be a series pilot movie, in addition to a webisode series.

The whole series on blu-ray is on sale for like $130 on amazon.

I don't know, I think this is precisely my main problem with the series. The fact is that I think the show strayed so far from the idea of free will, from the idea of free agency, from the idea of interesting ideas that it became sort of a disappointment. The ultimate answer for the perplexing and throughly provoking ideas raised by the show is, well, god did it. If not god, a supernatural force or forces playing a decisive and active role in the lives of humans and cylons. This idea being pushed to the extent that one of the main characters, IF not the main character, turns into a supernatural entity.

Coupled with the last two season's wheel spinning and incessant existential naval gazing (which can be interesting but, come on, the who's the cylon question was bit tired by that point) kind of makes it hard to re-visit this show, honestly. But it's still very well-made, the acting is fantastic, and on an episode basis, exciting TV.

BSG was a fantastic show through and through, but I maintain that they, like LOST, didn't think things through enough beforehand. I'm 100% fine with "writing the show as you go", most shows are and should be made like that, but that's not the same as introducing a mystery or mysterious element that the writers themselves don't have an answer to, and I think both shows were guilty of doing just that and in the long run it stops them from reaching their full potentials. I'm thinking about this a lot now, because I'm finishing Carnivále for like the third time, and there really is something magical about realising that all the weird shit that was thrown in a couple seasons back was significant and fully though out by the writers.