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Battlestar Galactica Reconsidered - Page 2

post #51 of 97
8/2/10 at 3:28pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Evi View Post
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.
Yep. There was a bunch of argument around Lost 's final season about the value or necessity of planning things out in advance in TV. I don't think you need to have storylines or character arcs mapped out from the very beginning, however, when your show has a significant mythology behind it, you need to have that locked down from the start. BSG's Final Five backstory was retconned in late in the game and it really feels like it. The Starbuck reveal also felt a bit tossed off to me, although I will say that nothing in BSG got as convoluted and arbitrary as Lost's final season.

It's not that you need to have the series finale scripted before the pilot airs; it's that when you introduce a mysterious monster, you need to have an idea of what kind of monster it is, where it came from, what it wants, etc..
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post #52 of 97
8/2/10 at 3:44pm
I recently re-watched the whole serious and I gotta say, THE PLAN still baffles me, especially as the series' final statement. The thing literally feels like a collection of deleted scenes and adds nothing substantial, even within the time period they were using.

Take Boomer, for instance... WHY did she have to have her memory blocked in order to be an effective sleeper agent? Every other Cylon we meet gets by just fine with regular lying. You could have a lot of fun answering that question, but they just ignore it. My idea was that Cavil did it to "teach her a lesson", just like he did with the Five. Maybe she betrayed him somehow in her "original life", which would've made her post-brainwash embrace of his character all the more tragic.

I will say however that like how Giacchino's ROAR makes CLOVERFIELD worthwhile, Bear McCreary's score justifies THE PLAN.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4lsNV3psc0

Great stuff.
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post #53 of 97
8/2/10 at 4:10pm
THE PLAN has no real reason to exist. Ron Moore even says in one of the extras how livid he was when David Eick threw that "And they have a plan" bit at the front of the show. There was no plan when they conceived the show and there was no plan in THE PLAN. I mean, other than killing all the humans they can find.

Frankly, with the series finale being such a grand statement, THE PLAN seems completely unnecessary. (McCreary's score or not, who is indeed one of the best TV composers around.)
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post #54 of 97
8/2/10 at 5:07pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Leto II View Post
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 weird you mention the nudity aspect.
When I was watching "The Plan" it was kinda like "oh look, theres a dick!"
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post #55 of 97
8/2/10 at 5:09pm
Seems like the original Clone Wars shorts are what this thing is going for. Which isn't such a bad idea!
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post #56 of 97
8/2/10 at 7:34pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pop Zeus View Post
THE PLAN has no real reason to exist. Ron Moore even says in one of the extras how livid he was when David Eick threw that "And they have a plan" bit at the front of the show. There was no plan when they conceived the show and there was no plan in THE PLAN. I mean, other than killing all the humans they can find.

Frankly, with the series finale being such a grand statement, THE PLAN seems completely unnecessary. (McCreary's score or not, who is indeed one of the best TV composers around.)
Although in the series' podcast commentaries (and even in The Plan's own supplements), it's mentioned several times by Moore, Eick, and others that the whole conceit was that the Cylons really did not have any plan to speak of, and that the point of the movie was to illustrate this -- one of them (it might've been Moore) says that "the plan was, that there was no plan" (or words to that effect).

So yeah -- it's certainly something of a meta-riff on the whole issue, with them showing that even Brother Cavil was playing/improvising things as fast-and-loose as the Colonials themselves were.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Warren Peace
Seems like the original Clone Wars shorts are what this thing is going for. Which isn't such a bad idea!
Yup -- short and sweet wins the race; though if it does eventually go to weekly series, it'll be a totally different ballgame.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, the intention seems to be to produce individual episodes totalling exactly 90-100 minutes in length; which could then be conceivably re-edited into a feature-length movie for broadcast and/or Blu-Ray release. 95 minutes or so is what your typical TV movie runs, minus commercials, and NBC Universal will undoubtedly be wanting to maximize their investment on this one as much as possible.
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post #57 of 97
8/2/10 at 10:21pm
I had thought "The Plan" simply referred to Cylons attempts to pro-create with humans, which would've been enough of an answer to let them off the hook (if somewhat underwhelming).
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post #58 of 97
8/3/10 at 12:39am
Thread Starter 
Yeah there are hunts of some sort of plan, or something going on, throughout the series:

In series 1 Athena tells Helo that Cylons bearing children with Human mates has an important religious significance to the Cylon...and the 3's make it a point to track Helo and Athena when they know they have a baby.

In the Farm it's shown the Cylon are desperate to create Cylon-Human Hybrids, and have "Farms" all over Caprica to use captive human women to bear Cylon children (?) . And fail every time.

It's made clear that in the BSG Universe Human Love (in Caps!) is necessary to conceive children.

Which makes it idiotic to then attempt to destroy the entire Human race.

In the New Caprica sequence it's mentioned (I think by Moore in a Podcast) that the Cylon can't put every Base Ship they have against the Galactica and Pegasus...that they are up to something that requires the majority of their Base Ships to be elsewhere...maybe creating that big ass Space Spider in the next to last episode?
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post #59 of 97
8/4/10 at 12:22am
The Space Spider ("colony") was supposedly where the final five spent their time between the two wars, so that couldn't have been it...

The drive to destroy humanity looks to be completely Cavil-driven, and he doesn't seem to much care about Cylon pro-creation. Seems like he would've been just fine with the currently existing models being the only ones.
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post #60 of 97
8/4/10 at 4:39am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cylon Baby View Post
Which makes it idiotic to then attempt to destroy the entire Human race.
I thought they made it pretty clear in the series that the crossbreeding thing was more the Sixes', Eights', Deannas', and Leobens' thing, and the Simons cast their vote in because they thought it was an interesting experiment. Cavill thought it was a waste of time up until the Resurrection Hub was destroyed, at which point it was just a matter of continuance of the species.
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post #61 of 97
8/4/10 at 6:26pm
This is one of the reasons I'll probably never rewatch the series. While I have a certain grudging respect for how well they cobbled together the backstory after the fact, it's still a backstory cobbled together after the fact. It's never going to hang together as a great, solid unified story. There are too many niggling inconsistencies in the early going that never fall in line. A show with this kind of structure should always have a plan laid out from the beginning.

Also the reason I will never rewatch the entire run of The X-Files.
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post #62 of 97
8/4/10 at 11:37pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
This is one of the reasons I'll probably never rewatch the series. While I have a certain grudging respect for how well they cobbled together the backstory after the fact, it's still a backstory cobbled together after the fact. It's never going to hang together as a great, solid unified story. There are too many niggling inconsistencies in the early going that never fall in line. A show with this kind of structure should always have a plan laid out from the beginning.

Also the reason I will never rewatch the entire run of The X-Files.
I think you are missing some good entertainment then. You can enjoy single episodes of both series without reference to the overall Arc.

I've been watching the X-Files Mythology episodes and as goofy as they get, they are still effective one on one.

Likewise with BSG, you can watch all of Season one, then skip to episodes like The Farm, Exodus 1 & 2 etc. and enjoy some mighty fine TV
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post #63 of 97
8/5/10 at 12:02am
I'm not missing anything. I've seen them all. There are plenty of other fine entertainments out there that I haven't seen yet. Rewatching is overrated.
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post #64 of 97
8/7/10 at 7:44pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
This is one of the reasons I'll probably never rewatch the series. While I have a certain grudging respect for how well they cobbled together the backstory after the fact, it's still a backstory cobbled together after the fact. It's never going to hang together as a great, solid unified story. There are too many niggling inconsistencies in the early going that never fall in line. A show with this kind of structure should always have a plan laid out from the beginning.

Also the reason I will never rewatch the entire run of The X-Files.
In television, great, solid unified stories with pre-thought-out plans set in stone years in advance are about as real as unicorns, or about as realistic as the odds of that one greasy, 300-pound Cat-Piss Guy you see at Comic Con with glasses, a ponytail, and lazy-ass neckbeard not being a virgin.

They're almost pure myth, and are seldom, if ever, encountered in the wilderness. Even shows like Babylon 5 -- arguably the poster-child for the "pre-planned story arc" -- pretty much totally abandoned or otherwise hugely modified said original, pre-planned arc starting in Season 2.

In fact, most shows on TV these days are still written season-by-season. This is nothing new. That said, just look at the original premise the BSG remake producers were handed:

Humanity nearly gets wiped out, and goes looking for Earth.

That's pretty much it -- and one should also bear in mind that they were reworking some major, Grade "Z" 1970s Glen Larson Slop™, which necessitated some major structural improvisations and pure intervention from God Herself to make it work as well as it does. The "classic Battlestar Galactica" was tame and limp, and had less thrills than a twenty-piece jigsaw of soft-focus kittens in bows on a wet Sunday afternoon. Even Lorne Greene with his blue rinse looked like he was about to burst into a showstopping number with a troupe of dancing girls dressed as fairies.

But like fine jazz, the when the new series sings, it sings.

Pretty much every single show ever made -- and I don't care which one you're talking about -- has its share of early, "niggling inconsistencies," but that doesn't necessarily invalidate rewatchability.

After all, should someone who's completely unaware of the season-by-season development nature of the show suddenly decide not to watch it once they find this out? "Pre-planned-story-arc fever" has taken too great a hold over us, methinketh.
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post #65 of 97
8/7/10 at 8:04pm
Leto, no offense but it seems like you've misunderstood what people are complaining about. Nobody's talking about pre-planned arcs. We're saying that writers need to have a grasp on the world and the mysteries they're presenting us with. The Plan, The Final Five, the various dreams and prophecies - all the things that should lead to a more rewarding rewatch - are dealt with haphazardly because they weren't properly thought out or were retroactively added to the continuity.
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post #66 of 97
8/7/10 at 8:50pm
It's because The Final Five was come up with on the fly that it works so well for me... the characters had no idea who they really were, and that's reflected in the writing. A revelation like that would come out of nowhere. I think it allowed Tigh to have perhaps the best arc of the series... what a journey. From honorable but incompetent drunk (season 1) to hateful, broken man (post-New Caprica) to wounded individual trying to hold onto his last shred of decency (rejoining Adam in the CIC) to ultimately becoming a thoroughly stand-up guy free of his worst demons.

Tigh's discovery of his identity is what starts his real recovery. His declaration at the end of Season 3 ("I'm Saul Tigh... whatever else I am...") is great. He find strength in a moment that should destroy him, and stands up in a way he hadn't since Ellen's death. And what a performance by Hogan. He makes it look so effortless that it's easy to under-appreciate just how good he was.
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post #67 of 97
8/7/10 at 10:30pm
And Tigh's big character development wouldn't have worked if the writers had known the backstory ahead of time? I'm sorry, I'm not seeing how that relates to the point.

When your show is going to revolve around the revelation of a history, it's mandatory that you work out that history before you start dropping the clues. Any other approach is sloppy storytelling.
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post #68 of 97
8/7/10 at 10:36pm
Leto II, I'll take...Glen A. Larson's Classic Battlestar Galactica over that...drivel, that Moore wrote any day of the week. Larson's Galactica was an awe-inspiring space opera, with excellent acting, action, and humor. As opposed to the...West Wing in space, which should have been cancelled after season 1.
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post #69 of 97
8/7/10 at 11:59pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
And Tigh's big character development wouldn't have worked if the writers had known the backstory ahead of time? I'm sorry, I'm not seeing how that relates to the point.

When your show is going to revolve around the revelation of a history, it's mandatory that you work out that history before you start dropping the clues. Any other approach is sloppy storytelling.
Well, those were two separate points, but I think when they came up with it is pretty irrelevant. The reveal came out of left field for the characters too, so it sorta worked.

Put it this way: how could The Final Five reveal have been done better? Have them talking about it since season 1? That would've been boring. Better to deal with it when the time came.
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post #70 of 97
8/8/10 at 2:25am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Warren Peace View Post
It's because The Final Five was come up with on the fly that it works so well for me... the characters had no idea who they really were, and that's reflected in the writing. A revelation like that would come out of nowhere. I think it allowed Tigh to have perhaps the best arc of the series... what a journey. From honorable but incompetent drunk (season 1) to hateful, broken man (post-New Caprica) to wounded individual trying to hold onto his last shred of decency (rejoining Adam in the CIC) to ultimately becoming a thoroughly stand-up guy free of his worst demons.

Tigh's discovery of his identity is what starts his real recovery. His declaration at the end of Season 3 ("I'm Saul Tigh... whatever else I am...") is great. He find strength in a moment that should destroy him, and stands up in a way he hadn't since Ellen's death. And what a performance by Hogan. He makes it look so effortless that it's easy to under-appreciate just how good he was.
I do find it funny though that when first told he was a cylon by the writers his immediatly reaction was "no I'm not!"

When it came to final 5 its seemed with the pure exception of the presidents assistant that it was the writers saying "so which people would it make no sense to be a cylon, ok that person is a cylon".
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post #71 of 97
8/9/10 at 6:22pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Evi View Post
Leto, no offense but it seems like you've misunderstood what people are complaining about. Nobody's talking about pre-planned arcs. We're saying that writers need to have a grasp on the world and the mysteries they're presenting us with. The Plan, The Final Five, the various dreams and prophecies - all the things that should lead to a more rewarding rewatch - are dealt with haphazardly because they weren't properly thought out or were retroactively added to the continuity.
I pretty much got what was being said, there, I think -- be it pre-planned story arcs or pre-planned characters, the complaint was that anything other than having the very last bolt tightened and letter "T" crossed prior to commencement of principal photography is simply unacceptable, and automatically renders the creative value of a TV series null and void, which is untrue.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
And Tigh's big character development wouldn't have worked if the writers had known the backstory ahead of time? I'm sorry, I'm not seeing how that relates to the point.

When your show is going to revolve around the revelation of a history, it's mandatory that you work out that history before you start dropping the clues. Any other approach is sloppy storytelling.
They did work out Tigh's original backstory before the series was even shot -- watch the deleted scenes for the 2003 mini-series. Roslin and Billy have a discussion concerning Tigh and his family history, and the fact that he couldn't live up to the rest of his family being famous politicians and statesmen (his father was a major hero of the First Cylon War, and his grandfather was a prominent presidential advisor, or something), so he turned to the bottle as time went on and essentially became a sad-sack drunken XO on a broken-down old Battlestar.

This was ultimately thrown out for good when it was decided to make him one of the Final Five, but as I pointed out earlier, lots of other major shows have come up with one version of character backstory and then later scrapped it/not used it when something better was conceived (The Wire being one of these).

But still, that's hardly "sloppy storytelling." As I said, lots of critically-praised shows do this.
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post #72 of 97
8/9/10 at 6:34pm
Also, the following article demonstrates that improvised, season-to-season storytelling on serialized genre television shows (like BSG and Buffy) is something wonderful, and which should be taken seriously:

"In Praise of Seat-of-the-Pants Storytelling."
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post #73 of 97
8/10/10 at 12:40pm
Again, it's only when you introduce a mystery element or heavy mythology that a "plan" becomes necessary. When you put a smoke monster in the show, you don't need to know what it will be doing 3 seasons down the line, but you do need to know why it's a monster and how being made of smoke works in a general sense.
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post #74 of 97
10/23/10 at 12:02pm
Syfy has greenlit a full, feature-length TV movie pilot for BSG: Blood and Chrome -- originally, it was to be a webisode series:

http://www.tvsquad.com/2010/10/22/sy...od-and-chrome/

It will likely air on Syfy next year, and a full TV series could receive a pickup order from the network. Details from the article:

  • Movie/potential TV series is set in the 10th year of the First Cylon War; Ensign William Adama is in his first year as a "rookie" Viper pilot, and a recent Academy graduate. A potential "love interest" will be introduced, as well as a top-secret mission "[that could] turn the tide of the war."

  • The Galactica is the "newest battlestar in the Colonial Fleet," at the time of the show.

  • Nico Cortez is at "the top of the list" for portraying Young Husker once again, but still may or may not do it, depending on various factors.

  • David Eick, Michael Taylor, David Weddle, and Bradley Thompson are the executive producers on the project.

  • Ronald D. Moore will have no real official connection to the show, only being present earlier when the initial pitch was made to the network. He's currently quite busy with The Wild, Wild West and other projects.

  • The existence of this show doesn't have any real bearing one way or another on the final fate of Caprica. It is its own "thing."

  • Bear McCreary will likely be the composer.

  • Shooting begins in Vancouver early 2011, for airing in late 2011 or early 2012.

Weddle and Thompson coming back? Awesome. They wrote some of the best episodes of seasons three and four. The article also mentions that some characters from BSG and Caprica might cross over to the new show, but they plan on using such devices sparingly.
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post #75 of 97
10/23/10 at 12:26pm
I felt kind of let down by the way GALACTICA played out ultimately, and have not been following CAPRICA (saw the pilot, found some of it interesting but it didn't look as tightly constructed as GALACTICA and I found some of the digi daughter stuff too goofy for my tastes). With that said, the First Cylon War (as described in the first season of BSG, anyway) sounded horrific and could make for good TV if they keep it dark. Without Moore's involvement I'm extremely skeptical (when his involvement on BSG began to decrease in the third season, that's when the show began to really go down hill IMHO), but all the same: BLOOD AND CHROME is a pretty neat title
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post #76 of 97
10/23/10 at 2:00pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
When your show is going to revolve around the revelation of a history, it's mandatory that you work out that history before you start dropping the clues. Any other approach is sloppy storytelling.
Fair enough. Where my pov differs is that the inability for TV writers to work all that out in advance is almost inherent to the medium. That's not entirely an excuse and it's not to say it's not impossible. Many shows have done it. But to have all that worked out 6-7 years before the end seems like a somewhat understandable offense, especially when there are all these inherent factors of TV production getting in the way of that. What they do with that huge retcon can take back some of the difference. In the case of BSG, I found the 4th season to be sloppy and frustrating but just as thoughtful and risk-taking as previous seasons. Compared to Lost's final season, it's downright inspiring.
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post #77 of 97
10/23/10 at 6:59pm
You construct a mystery, you need to construct a solution. You say there's a plan, you have to have some idea what it is. It's as simple as that. We're asking too much for TV shows to plan out 6 or 7 years in advance. Successful shows like the The Wire don't do it. But what makes the The Wire successful is because all the way to its last season, its last frame, it fulfills what it was trying to do from the outset. You put out something as specific as, there's a plan, from the first episode, set up this mystery that serves as its primary foundation, and don't really give a satisfactory answer...that's just bad storytelling.

Still a better job than Lost did.
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post #78 of 97
10/23/10 at 7:10pm
They talk about the nonexistent "plan" on the special features. Basically they admit screwing up by including those words in the opening crawl. Even though they were eventually replaced with something else, it was too late. The Plan is a waste of a TV movie just because there was no plan. Just violence.
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post #79 of 97
10/24/10 at 1:44am
Their mistake goes way beyond including the words "They have a plan" in the opening. Even if they hadn't flashed that sentence, it was still a part of the premise that the Cylons had an agenda. The fact that they moved ahead with the show before they had any idea what the backstory was is ridiculous. I'm not talking about having a detailed encyclopedia entry worked up. But they clearly had no idea where they were headed. They ended up having to spend an entire episode (and pieces of subsequent ones) simply explaining what they'd recently made up for the background. That's unacceptable.

Mind you, at least once they did that, they stuck to it. Unlike The X-Files.
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post #80 of 97
10/24/10 at 1:57am
The plan should have just been to blow the hell out of the humans and settle on their planets. That worked, except a battlestar got away, so they went after it just in case/to be sure.

That's really all they needed to establish was the plan. Everything else wasn't planned for and was the Cylons just reacting to what was happening.

From what I heard, Ron Moore (I think) was surprised that the thing about the plan was inserted in the credits. That wasn't the original intention.
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post #81 of 97
10/24/10 at 12:04pm
Yeah, like Greg is saying, it's not just the placard. From the get-go, the agenda of the Cylons was mysterious, as in random mindfuckery, nebulous eugenics, 4 Cylons types unfamiliar to them, mysterious. And not to have any idea where they were going to with that...still bad storytelling.
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post #82 of 97
10/24/10 at 4:01pm
Have to disagree. I was rather satisfied with most of the answers they gave us. Like I said earlier, any TV show that has every single tiny answer locked in stone eight years before shooting even starts is either totally full of shit, or doesn't exist.

And it's usually the latter.
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post #83 of 97
10/24/10 at 5:23pm
Again, I never said that they had to have "every single tiny answer locked in stone eight years before shooting even starts". Thanks for the reading comprehension. All I said is that they had to have some idea what the backstory was before they started dropping hints about it. And clearly, they didn't. They made it all up late in the game, and then tried to pay catchup in making the hints match up with their new information. That's sloppy by any rational measure.
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post #84 of 97
10/24/10 at 5:38pm
I was replying to Ali's post immediately above mine, not yours, Greg.

Yet, most TV shows ever produced have followed the model you described -- making it up as they go along, and adjusting things in mid-stream. That's kind of how the entire industry operates. Battlestar wasn't some five-episode BBC serial, where you get two or three years in between series to hammer everything out in fine detail. Like most American shows, it was created on the fly, and with no more or fewer inconsistencies than any other major U.S. show, including several tony HBO dramas I could name.

If that's "sloppy," you just associated it with some pretty good company.
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post #85 of 97
10/24/10 at 5:44pm
Yes, it's true that TV series used to work that way all the time. But TV series used to be completely episodic, so those holes in continuity were pretty minor. When a series is built around the idea that episodes won't stand alone, but will instead come together to form a single plot, a little more prep work is necessary.

Any show attempting a single over-arching plotline should learn from The X-Files. As in how not to do it. If you're going to build up to the solution to a mystery, figure out the answer first. Then start dropping the clues. It's basic Agatha Christie 101.
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post #86 of 97
10/24/10 at 5:54pm
Agreed, re: The X-Files. A show that should've ended four seasons before it actually did, and an object-lesson in total mythology-meltdown that still dazzles today.
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post #87 of 97
10/24/10 at 6:04pm
And I'll give Moore and crew this: unlike The X-Files, they never pretended that they had it all figured out from the beginning. And despite my dislike of the retconning nature of the final two season of Galactica, they did an infinitely better job of covering the seams.
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post #88 of 97
10/25/10 at 1:39am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Leto II View Post
I was replying to Ali's post immediately above mine, not yours, Greg.

Yet, most TV shows ever produced have followed the model you described -- making it up as they go along, and adjusting things in mid-stream. That's kind of how the entire industry operates. Battlestar wasn't some five-episode BBC serial, where you get two or three years in between series to hammer everything out in fine detail. Like most American shows, it was created on the fly, and with no more or fewer inconsistencies than any other major U.S. show, including several tony HBO dramas I could name.

If that's "sloppy," you just associated it with some pretty good company.
Battlestar Galactica concept hinged, centers, around on what the Cylons were doing. From the beginning, that was set up as a mystery. This isn't a matter of detail or inconsistency. It goes to its very core. That was the way the show presented itself. And the way they resolved it, after teasing it out for five seasons and amping anticipation, was sloppy, anticlimactic, and ill thought.
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post #89 of 97
10/25/10 at 3:14am
Really? Because 'what are the Cylons up to?' was answered at the end of Season 2. Cavill straight up says that they were trying to take over humanity's destiny, and then Caprica 6 and Boomer changed their mind about that. And then they changed it back when they detected the nuclear detonation of the Cloud 9.
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post #90 of 97
10/25/10 at 3:14am
I also got to say that the first season of the Battlestar sets things up that we believe are going to have an impact on something later on.

So for example, when the President and Boomer are having dreams about going after Boomer's child and Baltier and Six take the baby and close the door behind them. Well I'm was expecting something more than "they are all in the room and Baltier, Six and the Baby leave the room first shortly followed by the other two".
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post #91 of 97
10/25/10 at 3:36am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fafhrd View Post
Really? Because 'what are the Cylons up to?' was answered at the end of Season 2. Cavill straight up says that they were trying to take over humanity's destiny, and then Caprica 6 and Boomer changed their mind about that. And then they changed it back when they detected the nuclear detonation of the Cloud 9.
"Trying to take over humanity's destiny" is a vague, meaningless phrase. That's not a plan, it's a description on the back of a D&D module.
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post #92 of 97
10/25/10 at 4:07am
Or it's a more flowery phrase for trying to become fully human.
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post #93 of 97
11/14/10 at 9:03am
I'm not reading anything in this thread. Yet.

I just started watching BSG this past week. I'm a little over halfway through Season One. Addicted already. Lord, crazy addicted.

I'll check back after I finish the series. Part of me feels that there is no way the show can keep such a high level. Another part of me thinks that even a level below what I have seen so far will be several levels above most other sci-fi series.

So, basically, this is a worthless post. Well, not totally worthless: In a self-serving sort of way, it gives me a final chance to recognize some BSG before bed. Yes, the sun is coming up and I lament that I can't just watch one more episode today.

I feel so frak'd.[/2004]
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post #94 of 97
11/14/10 at 9:42am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cylon Baby View Post
OK, the "Should I watch BSG" thread got out of hand so I've started this one for all of those you have seen the new series or at least a large part of it.

It's a timely discussion as I've been going through the Blu Ray set, having just finished re-watching Season 2.

I first have to say that the first time I watched this series the narrative drive in Season One pretty much had me obsessed with watching the show through to the end. Thus I could overlook a lot of the weaker episodes, hoping to glean some detail of plot of character that would inform later episodes/story arcs/the ultimate Story.

Sadly on re-watching the series that basic obsession with "what's going to happen next?!" is gone. And the series as a whole does not really hang together as tightly as The Wire or other SF shows like Babylon 5.

But having said all that, there are things to love even more in this series upon re-viewing.

First as much as people praise 33, and rightly so, I'd nominate The Farm as the single best BSG episode. It shows Starbuck at her best, most vulnerable, and most resourceful. It shows Sharon AKA Athena making her final choice to stand with Humanity, to in effect choose to be human. And it shows the Cylons as right bastards, super intelligent yet devoid of basic empathy.

All of which is to argue that there are episodes that soar in each season even when the season as a whole doesn't hang together.

There are also character arcs that do remain consistent throughout the series, mainly Adm Adama's and Tom Zarek. Watching Zarek try stratagem after stratagem, seeing them fail and becoming both desperate and resigned, it's a perfect setup for his final arc, and the extremes that he takes in Season 4.

I could go on for pages about BSG but would love to continue the discussion about how the series ended. While I agree the series "resolution" had some serious flaws, and I really hate the whole idea of the Final Five (Just like Basketball with with one extra yo!") it ended in an interesting place, and didn't cop out as much as Network TV would.
Started off absolutely loving the show after Season 1 and absolutely despising it by the end of Season 4.
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post #95 of 97
11/14/10 at 5:54pm
Just finished re-watching season 1 and I'm seriously debating if I want to continue. I'm one of the people who HATED the finale and felt it was such a cheap cop-out. The whole Head Six and Head Baltar thing never really went anywhere, and seeing that shit all over again KNOWING that it's nothing more than filler material that "pays off" with nothing more than that stupid final scene with the Asimo robots.. it makes me see red. I almost want to go back and re-cut the entire series to remove that entire sub-plot to see if it would improve anything.

For the record, my initial thoughts on BSG were: Seasons 1 & 2 were some of the best, most ballsy TV I've ever seen. Season 3 was ok, but nothing special.. and it just went downhill from there. Of course, there was some brilliant stuff (like the mutiny episodes) mixed in amongst the crap.

As much as I hate the end of the series, it looks a hell of a lot better after seeing the Lost finale. Here's to hoping that Fringe doesn't botch their endgame too.. ONE of these shows needs to get it "right"!
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post #96 of 97
11/14/10 at 6:06pm
If you hated the final seasons so much, why would you even start re-watching it?
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post #97 of 97
11/14/10 at 6:23pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg David View Post
If you hated the final seasons so much, why would you even start re-watching it?
There were some good episodes amongst the last couple of seasons, I just felt they collectively shat the bed.

I'm re-watching in hopes that my love for the first two seasons may rekindle my interest and I can look at the rest of the show with fresh eyes. I WANT to love every aspect of this show. When this show was at its' peak, it was the best damned thing on TV.
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