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http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/11/battlestar-galactica-movie-starts-coming-together/ (http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/11/battlestar-galactica-movie-starts-coming-together/)

Can Jaws be that far behind?

While I enjoyed the reboot on its own merits, nostalgia kicked in as soon as I saw what looks like the original vipers. As long as they leave the stupid robotic dog out of it.

Then again, I wouldn't mind a Flash Gordon reboot. Timothy Dalton and Brian Blessed could reprise Vultan and Barin.

Nah fuck it - that movie was perfect - reboot Buck Rogers instead or start afresh with some 2000AD material. :D

How do you do this as a movie?

Sounds like a bad idea.

Wasn't it a movie before it was a TV show?  Or was the pilot just shown in theaters?

It was a full blown movie. You young 'uns, I swear. Also, a Flash Gordon remake would be a reboot of a TV series and I agree, the film needs no improvement.

The original movie was a pilot that was released theatrically in the international market, but broadcast on TV by ABC in the US.  It didn't get edited and released theatrically in the US until a year after its broadcast on ABC.

Yep... and 1 the original concept was a series of television movies, not a tv series. If you think about the major beats of the stories as they've been told, I think a trilogy would work fine:  Maybe Cylon uprising in one, the journey in the second, and defending Earth in the third.

Can't wait. Reboot was awesome.

Like this (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0991178/) :-)

If they have any sense they will never do 'finding earth'.

Just keep doing more journey movies till everyone gets bored, then leave it hanging. There is no way to end a Battlestar story well.

In fact I wonder if part of the logic behind this is someone wanting an eternal franchise like Disney.

I'm mentally way too firmly entrenched in the reboot universe as the real Battlestar Galactica for me to give this movie a fair shake, no matter how good it is (and I watched the original movie before I saw the reboot).   :awesome_for_real:

Though I'm willing to bet money it will probably be pure shit like most of the "we have no ideas left, lets rape the childhood of every age demographic and see what sticks" type movies Hollywood has been pumping out the last 15 years.
Well (spoiling both Battlestar series endings, don't click if you haven't seen):

If they'd stopped after the second season I'd agree with you. But everything from the boxing episode on was so bad I'm more than happy to see someone else try it it out.

All of this has happened before.....

They need to arrive back at earth and find skynet and terminators in charge.Now that no one would see coming  :awesome_for_real:

As long as all the terminators looked like...

(http://assets.vg247.com/current//2009/05/triciahelfer.jpg)

I largely agree with you.  After the new caprica arc ended, series went in a direction I did not like, and I would have been a lot happier if it was all scrapped and something different was done.

But having said that, oddly, I still enjoyed watching it all the way through.  Even if the over all plot went off the rails and got stupid, the third and fourth seasons were still fun for me.  The characters were still being themselves and doing the shit I enjoy, some good battles, ect.  Several little arcs they used were actually good, if only the overall stupidity of the plot was taken away.

So with all that, I still have fond memories of it all the way through (even if it fell apart for the second half), so it's hard for me to associate it with any other version now.

And yes, sexy robots are better than walking trashcans.   :awesome_for_real:

A science fiction series that was more than 50% watchable and not called Star Trek The Next Generation remains almost unheard of.

So I'm happy it existed.

But I'm unconcerned if someone else wants to reboot it. It is a much better reboot candidate than Star Trek, and a fantastic premise for at least the first movie.

Babylon 5.  The FX are as dated as TNG at this point, but 75% of the episodes were good.  Google the recommended episode watch list and follow it for ~ 60 hours of good story.

Some folks 'round here never cared for B5 or Farscape, but both meet that >50% watchable line for me.

Yeah. Both have a strong narrative line that holds up even with the weaker stuff and the aging FX.

Nothing after the New Caprica storyline was worth a good goddamn. Characters acted completely in opposition to their history and established personalities because... reasons. And that's not even getting into the utter stupidity of the "Final 5" or the "I'm an Angel" or "the Missing Link." Just utter fucking shit.

And I will cut the first motherfucker says B5 wasn't awesome.

I did a rewatch of B5 a few years ago.... I actually typed it up as a thread here.

B5 might not break the 50% mark.
- Season 1 is terrible, outside of a few storylines and some story arc setup.  
- Season 2-4 is the meat and potatoes, but there are some real turds...  and some of the storylines are awful.
- Didn't rewatch Season 5, since I remember it being pretty blah.
- The effects early seasons are painful.  They upgrade mid-run to moderately inoffensive.
- Holy shit is some of the acting terrible.
- That show was really saved by Londo and G'Kar, and the associated Centari/Narn storylines.  You were invested enough in their stories in the "B" storyline that it rescued some really atrocious "A" storyline nonsense.
- Blatantly borrows much of the story beats from LOTR, and later Moorcock.


Basically, you are forfeiting 2/5s of your series out of the gate.  If you have an adverse reaction to a couple of the long-running storylines (and there a few terrible ones!) then good luck.  The dialogue is flat out hokey.  Some actors make it work (Boxleitner) and some are just....   ughhhh.  

The effects are really, really bad.  The upgrade turns them into meh effects for the time, but they are well below even contemporary series.

I can't ding B5's effects - season 1 is a bit jittery but the others were really good for the time. FOR THE TIME. Now they look dinky as shit but they were pretty impressive when I first watched them.

Londo and G'Kar are fantastic, but I thought others did really well. Season 5 suffered from stuffing too much into one season and not being able to develop any of it properly. Honestly, they probably could have skipped season 5 other than Sleeping in Light and it would have been a better overall narrative unless they were going to take their time with the storylines there. Probably should have just been season 5 and 6, covering some of the stuff they started with in Crusade.

Some of the nonsense wasn't their fault...  Starbuck took off for a network tv show (Bionic Woman) and had to be written off, and then they wrote her back in after that was cancelled.

After New Caprica, the show was very much defined by some great highs and lots of meandering.  Poor Gaeta, poor Dee, finding ruined Earth, the mutiny, some of the trial of Baltar stuff.  The showrunners became really inept at moving between the awesome bits.

I've always thought a bigger problem SF fans have with BSG is that at a certain point, they didn't bother with the fig-leaf SF conventions and went unabashedly fantasy.  Certain categories of SF fans hate that shit.  I mean, Star Trek is obviously fantasy (teleporters, that can magically transport you between dimensions or rebuild bodies from scratch [conditional to plot]! FTL as fast as we need! Magic boxes that can make anything! Godlike aliens! Time travel!) but they've always maintained the technobable and sufficiently advanced technology handwave.

BSG was a grounded series that lost touch with the ground when the fantasy elements were too intense.  If you were going to have those elements in the series, they needed to be better laid out - like GRRM did with Song of Ice and Fire.  The very first chapter involves the Walking Dead - and then nothing else magical until the last pages of the first book. 

B5 - for the time - was amazing.  If you watch only the episodes that JMS wrote, you get a pretty good series.  They're not all great, but they all fit - and once you get to the end of season one the studio interference is lessened and it really hooks.  Claudia Christiansen, Michael O'Hare's situation (which was managed as well as it could be) and the networks screwing with the final 2 season plans took their toll, but I still think of it as my favorite series because it was soooo much better than everything else out there at the time.  When I rewatch it now, I watch the Pilot and then skip to Geometry of Shadows.  Then I watch until the end of season 4 (taking the few bad with the good) and then watch a handful of episodes in Season 5 - mostly G'Kar and Londo focused episodes. 

BSG is a good example of why Ron Moore is a great writer and series lead but also needs somebody to tell him "no, that's a stupid fucking idea". At one time he pitched the idea that that awful DS9 episode where Sisko is a writer from the 50s who made it all up and may have been insane was actually the reality of the show. Seriously, if he'd gotten his way DS9 would've had a St. Elsewhere ending. Luckily, the people at Paramount said "fuck no!"

Apparently the people at SyFy didn't have the balls or the brains to do that and we got one of the worst endings to a great TV show ever made.

I'm confused now, which iteration of BSG will be made into a movie. The eighties version or the 2003 remake?

Babylon 5's biggest problem is that the constant meddlling of the of TV execs and the fact that it was almost always on the brink of cancellation is noticeable in the seasons. It also shares the same issue a lot of other 90's shows - especially sci-fi and fantasy shows - had. The first season is truly terrible and awkward to watch. Thze same can be said for TNG Season 1 though.

The highs of B5 are so high though that I can deal with the low points. They also made a few decent 'made-for-TV' movies after the series ended its run.

BSG (2003) would have been considered a classic even after New Caprica (or the "we blew our entire budget already, so bottle episodes from here on out" season) if they had ended mid season 4. Basically cut to black when they find earth completely destroyed. Would have made fans really angry at the time but would be leagues better than the "it was god all along" shit it ended on.

I personally dislike it when Sci Fi does that, that's why I'm not a fan of Arthur C. Clarke who does that all the time (The Rama series of books is basically that. "Aliens" so advanced that they're pretty much a stand in for God did all that). The problem with BSG is that it started out as a treatise on post 9/11 America and ended up as a sort of twisted take on the book of Mormon.

Yeah, we've become far too jaded with regard to computer animation in the 20 years since. To understand just how amazing the graphics were, consider that nobody had a 3d card in their high-end machines. The outcry of a mandatory graphics card for EQ was still 4 years away. The Pentium processor was less than a year old and the web was still 6 years from being a thing more than a few geeks knew about.

As for the story, I don't count S1 of most shows against them. TNG S1 was so awful I just skip any episode I see a beardless Riker. DS9 season 1 was also kind of hit-or-miss. B5's S1 set the characters and the interactions very well. It opened up wonderfully after that. *shrug* Some people disagree. I'm good with enjoying it and Farscape on my own.

There was no eighties version, but my understanding is that this is neither the 1978 version nor the 2004 version - it is an entirely new version.

(http://i.imgur.com/zDvQQYT.jpg)
Never forget.

 :ye_gods:
Agh!  the flashbacks to my traumatized childhood are flooding in....Ugh that show was so godawful, and that IS in comparison to the original Battlestar Galactica.

Those motorcycles were the worst.

Londo and G'kar saved B5 from utter mediocrity. They are soooo good they managed to mitigate so much bad in the series. The Centari and Narn conflict, the Centari internal conflict, the Centari conflict with the Shadows, the Narn's utter desperation as a people. The 'B-Plot' of B5 was actually the main plot in disguise. The only things I fondly remember from B5 that aren't somehow driven by any of the above, are the battle of the line, the president attempting to literally scorch the earth and that one scene where Deleen tells EarthGov to fuck off. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvkgfBXHPA )


The modern BSG series was great as a plot driven show until the writers realized they ran out of plot and attempted to turn it into a character based show, except the characters were nothing more then devices to drive the plot and had little to no internal consistency. Then magic space angel hallucinations stopped being hallucinations and  :uhrr:

I dont really get the "Ripped off X" arguments. Every writer steals stuff from previous writers, hell I've seen places talk about where Tolkien ripped off previous writers. What matters to me is if its well done. And in general B5 did it fairly well. Hell the B5 movie "Thirdspace" basically ripped off Lovecraft, but that does not stop it being a really good movie.

What irked me though was when some subplots were canned because of where JMS or someone wanted to focus on the Earth conflict which was frankly the least interesting parts of B5. Season 4 had the shadow war and the Minbari conflict reduced to a few episodes whereas the Earth civil war shit took up most of the season and got so boring I decided to stop watching as I really couldn't care less.

And I'm sorry but the effects were the shit, and in general they still look pretty good today. And the scary thing is that the effects house went out of business after that, which is a damn shame.

Whenever I hear someone complain that a thing is a ripoff of another thing, I assume what they really meant is "this was so boring that to pass the time I started analysing story structure and thinking of other less boring things that had comparable elements".

Yeah, writers ripping shit off of other writers? Every writer ever has done that whether they know it or not. There are innovations on story structure and what not but for the most part, thousands of years of human civilization has produced an inability to be truly unique and original. I'm not going to ding a writer for being unoriginal unless it's so derivative that there doesn't seem to be any reason for the story to exist on its own.

I'd forgotten about poor old Dee. The show was always pretty "dark" and adult. Season One has the human race close to extinction with the two leaders at each other's throats and simultaneously colluding in a big lie (the mini series ends with Adama admitting he has no idea where Earth is and Roslin agreeing to keep his secret). But it was still fun to watch and this is true of a lot of dark drama - eg the Sopranos, things the Cohen brothers do.

Even Saul getting his eye scooped out was interesting, it was character development in a fashion. When he murders his wife it's horrible but really gripping, it's a great story.

When Dee shoots herself it seems to be nothing more than an attempt to upset the viewer. It's not interesting. Horrible horrible.

The last two seasons of BSG were full of that kind of shit, though. Things that just made no sense to the character, like Gaeta's mutiny or that shit where he got his leg hurt in the first place. Or the Starbuck angel shit. Or that entire boxing episode.

That was the most realistic suicide I've seen on film or tv.  She basically spent an episode making amends and mending bridges, then did it.  It very much rang true to when I've had friends do the same.  It worked in show to underline the disappointment and depression of the characters who, after years of looking, find Earth and it's a radioactive wasteland.


Gaeta was hurt because Starbuck is a fuckup, and then Zarek used that to talk him into the anti-alliance with the Cylons faction.  Gaeta was an obvious tragic figure in that whole mess.  Years of taking abuse and being ignored, including letting the people who cripple him off scott free, leads him to an alliance that blows up in his face.

Err, from the very beginning, I thought BSG was a character driven show, with a vague overall plot to tie it together (we are traveling in space till we find the holy land!).  It was fairly obvious they were making the overall plot up as they went, and it always relied on the character drama as the primary draw.  That was a big draw for me at least.  Watching their development.
Agree with all of this.  I thought both Dee and the mutiny were some of the highlights I mentioned before about the 2nd half.  I really liked the Mutiny concept.  It made a ton of sense, and gave realism to the show.  They were at the end of all their supplies, had traveled through pure hell for years, and now they find out their big hope is all ash.  It makes total sense that a large amount of people would decide on a leadership change, including characters we know.  Or decide there's no reason to continue to suffer, and just end it.

I never forgave BSG reboot for when the other humans showed up and they were comic book character levels of evil. Its lazy and shitty and stupid. Stopped watching never tried to pick it back up and finish it.

As for B5 I liked the shadow war stuff a LOT, as a child I thought the huge multi-race battles were cool. The Vorlon were my kind of mysterious edge. Good times. I doubt it holds up beautifully but at the time (remember that TV was so much shittier back then) at that age it for sure broke the 50% crap barrier for me. I owned B5 spaceship miniatures for fucks sake. Several big chunky Narn ships in pewter or lead or whatever. Good times.

My problem with both the Dee suicide and the Gaeta mutiny was that I didn't buy their turns, nor their reasons for doing what they did. It just didn't ring true, and I didn't think any of the reasons Johnny Cee gives for those character turns rose to a level worth doing what they did.

There's a difference between borrowing elements and borrowing wholesale.  The Ring of Power is heavily based on the Ring of Gyges parable and Germannic cursed artifact folklore, but you take it and then do your thing.

Basically most of the overarching story beats in the Shadows-Vorlons arc were directly adapted from LOTR, right down to the Elder Races sailing off into the West at the end and leaving the setting for Man the Younger Races.

Sheridan (Frodo/Aragorn) goes to Xahadum (Mount Doom) with an actual nuke instead of an allegorical nuke, is saved by Eagles (Vorlon), gets to marry Arwen the half-elf (Delenn the half-Minbarri) but pays a terrible price and doesn't get to enjoy his victory.  Kosh echoes Gandalf, including resurrection...  The envoy from higher powers that goes out into the world to prepare against the coming of the enemy.  Londo is Saruman (using tools of the Enemy leads to being an antagonist) but props to JMS, this is a really interesting take and Londo is a much more nuanced character.

On the other hand, you have Martin's ASOIAF which is basically War of the Roses combined with subverting fantasy tropes and hero's journey expectations to make something new.

My rewatch of B5 is here: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=18379.0

Yah man, fair enough.

Dee's last episode was pretty classic "saying goodbye" if you have ever seen it before, and I hope you haven't.

Gaeta was repeatedly fucked by the main characters over and over.  Almost airlocked by secret trial? Being crippled and the people who did just get to run around and fuck more stuff up?  The lies and bullshit Adama/Roslin fed the fleet to keep hope up?  I could definitely see why he decided to do what he did (and immediately regret it when he realized the fucking psychopaths he was allied with).

Yeah, suicides would be happening after finding Earth like that, but not hers.  Was it a good portrayal of what someone who is suicidal would do in their last moments?  Sure.  It still didn't make sense that Dee would do it.

Gaeta, on the other hand, makes perfect sense.  Maybe some of you have forgotten just how hard that poor dude got unjustly shit on by EVERYONE.

BSG was a good show, but where it began to fail, IMHO, was when they started to look at destinations and then try to figure out how to get to the destination rather than letting the characters' stories develop and see what destinations might flow from those actions.  

The difference between the two approaches: If you preselect your destination, you often have to force a character to change in order to get them where they need to be.  If you let the character be themselves and then look for interesting destinations and events to put in their path, the characters experience less pressure for alteration in unnatural ways.  The worst BSG moments were the ones where you found yourself saying, "Really?  Why did they do that?"

What exactly about Dee makes you guys think it was out of character for her to off herself?  Most other people would be horribly fucked mentally by finding earth like that, but not her!   :headscratch:

Also, maybe we should put a spoiler tag on this thread.   :why_so_serious:

"You're only as good as who you're ripping off."
                                                   -- Little Steven, ripping off someone


I've always found it interesting how one person's favorite part of a creative work can be someone else's least favorite -- says a lot about human nature doesn't it?

As for me, BSG was a character driven show that always had something to keep me going, every episode, all the way to the end. And honestly I've known too many people to act "out of character" in real life to expect anything more from the fictional ones...

As for the new reboot, I'll judge it on its own merits, but it's got a pretty high bar to clear to even match the best of the last one.

One of the things I really really liked about Gaeta through the first few seasons was his undying loyalty. Maybe that makes less sense than his turn into mutineer but it was what made me want to know more about the character. When they saddle him with the limp, none of that was portrayed forcibly enough to make me think it would be a reason he would listen to the asshole mutineers (who really were fucking assholes whose own motivations should have seemed suspect to Gaeta). In short, I thought Gaeta's character was a lot stronger than they portrayed him once they started him down the path to mutiny.

For me the show jumped the shark in the scene where the 5 (?) crew people who are cylons follow the sound of music and meet up in some hangar.

The whole "you'll never guess who else is a Cylon!" thing was silly and uninteresting, and then the reveal was also silly and uninteresting, and they didn't seem to know what to do with it.

It seems to me that they ran out of story at the end of season 2. They did a season of flying around searching for earth, and a season of insurgency stuff, then needed something else. The idea of people thinking they are human but really not, and how that affects them and how they integrate into society, could be interesting but it just wasn't in execution.

It didn't help that the whole idea of who was a secret cylinder was literally hackdom in its planning.  They drew names from a hat. There was no grand plan, no overall gotcha and the fact that they drew Tigh and didn't immediately realize what a clusterfuck they'd just created only underscores the hack. 

Yeah, idea of the final 5 Cylons was a good one. Who they picked was so incredibly stupid and random that it stuck out like a sore thumb. And "The Plan" that they tried to graft onto that situation made no goddamn sense either because it literally did seem like they picked the characters out of a hat rather than with any real intent.

Nah, I thought the entire final five concept was terrible.  It was literally something they ran with because in the first season they gave an exact number of models, but by the start of the third season, they had put everybody into a situation where there was no way they just hadn't seen them all yet.  No matter who they picked, yet entire concept was silly, and that major plot point is the number one thing I wish hadn't happened.  It was that one plot point that ruined the second half.

I give the a lot of BSG a pass because of the writer's strike, which iirc timed with the episodes aired at the end of the second and into the third season. And also iirc, things really started picking up again around the mid-third.

What I never liked was the creeping doom of the whole thing. Nobody knew where they were going, and even after the Cylons stopped chasing them, they still offed themselves right good. Didn't the original refugees go from like 60K down to like 30K survivors?

In another timeline, there was a consistent arc well executed by writers. Or everything leading up to New Caprica but done better (except Scar. That was dumb).

We'll see about these movies. Will watch one at least.

But yes, them arriving at Earth in the future with crazy tech that blows the shit out of the Cylons but then adopts the BSG refugees not so much in the District 9 way but neither in the V way, that I'd love. My "I'm still 10 years old" mind keeps seeing a heavily damaged BSG holding back to give coverage to the colonists get to Earth, Adama about ready to give up all sad he brought death to yet another planet, and then a quick cut to some future Parliament/UN thing on Earth with Bill Pullman turning to some weapons engineer saying "let's show 'em what we got" all Riker "Mr LaForge, fire." style. Fade to-be-continued.

It lost it way before that for me.

Everything before New Caprica was great, New Caprica was ok, nothing after that worked.

The final five I had no particular objection to, after the fact it felt like they were the only 5 characters left who could reasonably be chosen, which was weak, but they at least allowed the cylons an ending. By season 4, cylon motivations were entirely about resolving tension between the cylon models, the final 5 gave a focus for that. It wasn't great, but at least it meant you had a conflict that you could watch the reactions to and the resolution of.

The problem was the human ending. All spiritualist bullshit had no payoff and provided nothing characters could meaningfully react to, it wasn't really a clue to anything important, just a few overliteral prophecies turned out in the least interesting way possible without granting agency to any of the supposed heroes (dying leader will guide you home.... through guesswork apparently). Then they found a planet without earning it, and blew up their spaceships for no reason.

I struggle to see how Galactica can have a satisfying ending for the humans if they don't establish a more tangible problem to be overcome - a way for the crew to earn Earth. I also struggle to see how you can write a satisfying ending if the relationship with whatever Earth is, isn't built up for more than the last 20 minutes of the story.

I enjoyed the stuff with Gaius Baltar and the Cylons after New Caprica even if it made no sense. When the Cylon is torturing Baltar and he's screaming "I love you!" and she's confused (and I think falls in love with him there), it's really powerful even though it's completely batshit.

Gaius is actually talking to head-Six in that scene. I understand that the big reveal is that head-Six really is an angel from God just like she said she was but never really understood why that meant she kept on taking Gaius into a headspace where they had sex together. Or why she manipulates Baltar into giving a real Cylon a nuclear bomb to blow up a spaceship full of people and lead the Cylons to New Caprica causing death and misery to human and Cylon alike, beyond just saying it's God's plan and God works in mysterious ways.

In fairness, if I get a head angel, I really want her to look like that and actually, you know, give head.

BSG could never establish a real story arc because of how SciFi (nee SyFy) had to handle it.

It was a backdoor pilot that only exists because Universal Pictures sponsored it which led to a series order that only exists because BSkyB co-funded production. That's why the serie premiered on Sky One in the UK 3 months before it launched in the US. SciFi constantly struggled with the production budget of BSG. Most of the key production choices like human looking Cylons and the low tech Battlestar have been made to keep costs managable, as has been the choice to film in Vancouver.

Even then Moore and Eick regularly ran over the alotted budget per episode and had exhausted the series budget usually thee quarters into a season. That's why there's so many low-fi episodes. The whole New Caprica arc is basically a consequence of the writer's strike and also a symptom of the constant budget overruns basically requiring them to make a whole bottle season.

Without the huge DVD and Blu Ray sales the series would have been cancelled after the first season and without the coffers of Universal Pictures and BSkyB SciFi would have never had the money to bankroll it. Even so showrunners usually didn't know if the series would be renewed or how many episodes SciFi would order until very much to the last moment, making planning out an arc for a season a fool's errant. Also the constant budget overruns almost always required rewrites or restrcuturing of seasons a necessity to keep the production from running out of money half way through.

The Cylons might have had a Plan, the writers clearly didn't though and so they fell into the same trap Lost did by oversexing the mystery aspect of a show they made up on the fly.

That it turned out as amazing as it is for large streches of the show is a small miracle

They got the show off to a great start simply by thinking, "Ok, what would this really be like, to be the desperate survivors of a robotic apocalypse (e.g., a disaster that's ultimately your own fault)?"

I think if they had settled early on with the idea, "And ok, to make the Cylons more interesting than Terminators, let's establish that they actually have a religion--that they believe that they're God's chosen, instead of the human beings. Because if it's a religion, that leaves room for some Cylons to dissent, and it leaves room for them to misinterpret or change or debate their own doctrines". So the baby factory, for example, didn't have to be part of a methodical Plan that all Cylons hold to, it could just have been one faction or group of religious Cylons believing that God wanted them to find out how to make babies in their own synthetic bodies. etc.  Just deciding that was the basic take would have made the show much stronger.

Then you drop some of the unearned or poorly considered mystical stuff. That was where they tried too hard to make a "mystery hook" to keep the narrative tumbling along. I would have been perfectly happy with the idea that Baltar's "head Cylon" was some sort of neurological nanovirus that the Cylons were experimenting with that he couldn't get rid of no matter what he did--maybe they were looking for ways to control human beings and couldn't do more than just inject their consciousness into an existing consciousness, that could have been played with a lot as the show progressed.

New Caprica was fine. Even the idea that eventually some religious dissident Cylons and the surviving humans end up working together to flee some sort of Cylon Orthodox Church could have been great.

The basic thing is this: no showrunner ever, ever should hint at answers to hidden mysteries that they haven't thought of yet. It is always, always a bad idea that ends up making people angry when it's all over.

A good theory, but it ignores that the religion was always a part of the series, not an afterthought for motive rationalization.

http://www.mormonthink.com/glossary/battlestargalactica.htm

I mean, the mystical/religion stuff was in from day one.  Even if there was a chip/nanos in Baltars head, it gave him actionable information more than once (she pointed out the weakness or whatever in one of the early base assaults?  fuzzy memory).  That's what I mean by the scifi fig leaf.  "Oh, its a chip".  I mean, a chip/nanos that are undetectable and work over vast differences, that are somehow able to give Baltar necessary information at just the right moment?  As long as you maintain a possible SF explaination, even if its obviously magic or just a filming crutch, some people roll with it.  If you say, "yah its God/magic" then whew boy!

It's like Star Trek replicators.  They are literally magic boxes that can produce anything, except when they can't.  Hang some technobable on it, people don't question it too much.  (And yes, in reality they are a crutch for filming a TV series so we don't have to watch our main characters go through stores, or the excitement of regularly picking up freight of food and supplies.  Just like teleporters were a filming crutch to eliminate shuttle travel time and allow actors to swap scenes between ship and planet instantly).

Head Six was going on about religion pretty much from day one.

The 12 colonies believe in the Roman/Greek pantheon and Balthar is basically Saul/Paul. He got saved from Armageddon because he renounced the old pagan gods and pledged his soul to Head Six's God. God saved him from a nuclear blast and made him a prophet/agent. In the mini series/pilot. They haven't been subtle about it either.

The series itself is styled on the exodus of the 144,000 and Mormon scripture.

Religion has been the core of BSG from the start.

I think it's fine for characters to have religious motivations.

It's also fine in SF to argue that their religion has a point and to build that into the world. But not as a figleaf for plotting mistakes--any more than it's cool to have tech cover for plotting mistakes or bad character development.

Yes, but saying a god did it isn't a sufficient replacement for a story arc.

The overarching human plot in season 3 and 4 was just a stream of unintelligible pointless god-themed gibberish until they trip over planet earth. Twice.

I concur. Being about religion is different from having religious explanations for things. But even if you are going to create a fictional universe in which religion is real there are still better ways to do it than "lol she came back as an angel or something we guess - shrug!"

"Every shitty aspect of this show was just God's plan" is a terrible way to handle things, even inside the context of religion being real, angels existing, etc.

I don't disagree.

I was just replying to someone saying that BSG wasn't about religion at first and later turned into a religious show. Themes of religion had been in it right from the start.

If the way they handled it was great or not is another issue alltogether.

What I was saying was it would have been better if they had not done the vision stuff at the end of the first season and then all the stuff with Starbuck coming back later on--that they should have steered clear of that kind of "religious" material, because they hadn't thought it through.

Does anyone disagree that the show started strong but ended as lost as Lost? They didn't have a well fleshed out ending in mind and it showed. Sadly, Caprica had a plan, but lacked the early quality and never had a chance to walk their path. I'm sure that had the show conyinued, it would have been one of yhose shows we laclusterly followed to the end...

Lost had a better ending (of course, I liked Lost's ending for the most part). I think the part about the angels in BSG pissed me off the most not because it used the religious angle that had been in the show from the beginning, but because it went from religion to magic with no real explanation and no set up. The Cylons views on monotheism vs. the colonists' polytheism was an interesting dynamic rife with story potential. Starbuck returning from a wormhole as a schizo angel was just random WTF, didn't earn any of its mystery and didn't serve any good story purpose other than providing a "God did it" explanation for shit that wouldn't have made any sense otherwise.

Lost was a shitshow of making it up as you go along.

Yeah, religion as a story element can work well and the basic set-up in BSG was really interesting (especially having Cylons with a religion the viewer could probably identify more with). Hell it can even work really well with fortuitious events as a 'maybe that's God's will' reading possible (and even lean heavily on coincidence if that's an angle the writers want to push i.e. God is real and influencing events). With the basically Sci-Fi setting though, suddenly coming out and having just plain impossible miracles seems like 1) lazy writing and 2) Like the writers had no fucking clue what was meant to be happening and just made shit up last minute after a bender the night before.

The way TV handles series means that basically all of TV is making shit up going along. Many showrunners don't know if they get renewed or not right until production has to start for the new season and most showrunners don't even know the final episode orders for a season until Episode 12 or so.

Producers of most shows - NCIS et al nonwithstanding - can't plan anything that involves more than a few episodes in detail because they might not know if they still have a job next season or if the network will order 12, 18 or 24 episodes.

Even today if a producer tells you that he/she has worked out season spanning arcs and knows how the series will end he/she is mostly bullshitting you.

Which is why all the netfilx stuff is so strong in comparison. They give you X episodes and put your narrative into that.

The problem with both Lost and BSG, and any other fiction of the sort, is that an individuals response to suggestion and mystery through their own imagination is always going to be more interesting than any reveal, no matter how well executed.

The problem of both shows is caving to demands to explain, rather than let the world just be mysterious.

Then again, I like a healthy dose of the unexplained. I know others don't feel the same, and will complain if it's either left unexplained, or explained to less than their satisfaction. It's a lose-lose situation to me.

There are some things I am okay with them never properly explaining (the Smoke Monster, or where the hell the prophecies came from). There are others that are pretty much mandatory that they be resolved (who was in the other boat, WTF made Baltar so damned special he got his own personal angel from God).

--Dave

It all happened before and it will happen again.

Eh, they could leave it with the same explanation for why Cassandra got visions in ancient mythology. A god did it in order to better serve their purpose. BSG was meant to be a kind of Sci-Fi religious story, the Bible never says why Elijah was granted the word of God (usually) but the fact that God communicates with them lets them perform some role in the plan. In this case they're straight up taking miracles like a Sci-Fi retelling of Old Testament tales.

Actually I kind of like that idea, never really seemed to communicate that was what they were doing very well though. It does get messy with injecting tropes from one genre into a setting from another. It's actually weird how unsatisfying that can be in terms of questions I would never think to ask in something like LotR I am definitely thinking of in BSG.

This. Hence Game of Thrones HBO series now leading the books. Forget all hope ye who enter. The big $$ is rolling in now drive by the machinery of work-until-funding-runs-out. Maybe it'll work out this one time.

And NCIS has gone on forever and has remained mostly consistent. But some shit's getting really long in the tooth according to my wife. I ran out of shits to give seasons ago.

NCIS just got picked up for 2 more seasons as well, although Micheal Weatherly is leaving.

For all they talk about record ratings for The Walking Dead and GoT, NCIS shits on all of them. It's ratings are bonkers. Only problem is no one under the age of 40 watches the show.

That's because it's not very interesting TV.

Ok I just watched the pilot of BSG Pilot and a handful of random episodes, but I always had the idea that Sexylon downloaded herself into his brain somehow dowing the big booms and that was why she was always with him in VR. That at least would ahve been a "sci-fi" method of explaining her hanging around rather than "Almost an angel"

But yeah the Whole mormon thing was always a big part of B5, even in the old series. I actually have a "best of" boxed set of the old series and those episodes still hold up pretty well. Which isnt to say that 2/3 of the old series wasnt complete crap of course.

The problem with the Cylon 5 hing that pretty much had my uninterested in the series is that the whole idea was complete crap and utterly predictable. Why? becasue it was playing into the huge amount of american parinoia that was in vouge at the time. "OMG YOU DON'T KNOW WHO THE ENEMY IS!!!" was a big thing at the time, as well as "Our leaders are lying to us!!!" Somehow it felt like Americans are just not comfertable without a Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads and simple trust is something that cannot be allowed to develop between characters. Trust cannot be developed if you have a huge fed flag jammed in there from the start. Frankly the very fact that they were testing people for Cylonness would have had the fleet tearing itself apart within a week in reality. Giving people who are already amped up another reason to be parinoid leads to riots and purity witchhunts. But to certain Americans living in a state of mistrust sems to be a comfort zone (which again leads back to mormonism)