Battlestar Galactica

[Fordel]

Random TV Extra's that we see for tops, 2 minutes an episode? They might as well have been wearing Red Shirts. Some random marines died too, let us all weep in sorrow, or something.

The only people of any consequence that actually died were the last two.



The Highlights for me was the Chief crawling through the ship, Lee not pulling the pin on the grenade and Starbucks swagger after she knocked out that dude taking a leak.  

[tazelbain]

Any ideas what the significance of the scar deep in Galictica is?

[Fordel]

Probably triggered a flashback or something.

[Lum]

You don't think literally killing off every member of the civilian government save Roslin (who's about to drop dead from Teh Cancer) and Lee Adama wasn't enough of a body count?

Lee wasn't killed. You're probably thinking of Anders.

No, I meant that Lee and Roslin are the only civilian leaders ALIVE. The Quorum is going to find it hard to make a, well, quorum.

And the scars at the end = stress fractures. Galactica's days are numbered. Which makes sense, Ron Moore HATED Voyager making it through the Delta Quadrant spic and span. Galactica hasn't had drydock maintenance for a few years now... it's probably only good for a few more episodes. (What a coincidence...)

[Abagadro]

No, I meant that Lee and Roslin are the only civilian leaders ALIVE. The Quorum is going to find it hard to make a, well, quorum.

Ah, read that wrong.  You can scrape up politicians from anywhere though.

[Fordel]

You don't think literally killing off every member of the civilian government save Roslin (who's about to drop dead from Teh Cancer) and Lee Adama wasn't enough of a body count?

Lee wasn't killed. You're probably thinking of Anders.

No, I meant that Lee and Roslin are the only civilian leaders ALIVE. The Quorum is going to find it hard to make a, well, quorum.

And the scars at the end = stress fractures. Galactica's days are numbered. Which makes sense, Ron Moore HATED Voyager making it through the Delta Quadrant spic and span. Galactica hasn't had drydock maintenance for a few years now... it's probably only good for a few more episodes. (What a coincidence...)

That makes more sense then my flashback theory. The Galactica has survived what, 3 nukes by now? 

[Tannhauser]

Another good episode but it's filler to me.  Maybe next week we get back to the main story-line.

Zarek was perfect, especially his final comment about the quorum.  I love the whole Gaeta story.  I hate the misuse of Baltar, this story seems to be stuck.

I'm not thrilled with the final cylon but let's see what happens.  I feel that we're stumbling towards the end.

[Venkman]

the scars at the end = stress fractures. Galactica's days are numbered. Which makes sense, Ron Moore HATED Voyager making it through the Delta Quadrant spic and span. Galactica hasn't had drydock maintenance for a few years now... it's probably only good for a few more episodes. (What a coincidence...)

Hunh, hadn't thought of that. I thought those were blood trails from the floor above, assuming that floor was the hangar deck in which the quorum was bleeding out.

But then, I have no idea wherein the ship the FTL drive is. Except that it's one long ass crawl.

[Fordel]

The ship IS ridiculously huge. Something like 1.5 KM long, half a KM wide.

My assumption is the FTL is way in the back, near the sublight engines.

[Oban]

Cylon Centurions almost disabled the BSG's FTL engine way back when.  Those scars are from a Centurion's claw.

The amusing thing about that scene was supposed to be that a cylon just disabled the FTL to save the fleet.

[Fordel]

That also makes more sense then my flashback theory.


But now I am upset we didn't get any Centurions in THIS episode 

[Oban]

Also, the day of the rope occurred on Colonial One which is a separate ship from BSG.

[Venkman]

Also, the day of the rope occurred on Colonial One which is a separate ship from BSG.

Right, but it was sitting in the Galactica's hangar deck when it happened. I figured it'd be a stretch for the quorum to bleed out through that ship, through the deck, and then right into the area Tyrel happened to be standing, but it's what I thought at the time

The Centurion claw mark makes the most sense. You happen to remember the name of that episode?

[Oban]

The one with the ship full of toasters that lands inside of bsg.

 

Edit:  Valley of Darkness

[Lum]

Uh... from this interview: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2009/02/battlestar-galactica-gaeta-blood-scales-angeli.html

What's the significance of the big crack in the wall in the big room that houses Galactica's FTL drive?

Well, it’s a big… crack.  In the hull.  Of Galactica.  Right?

[Oban]

Lies!  It is an allusion to the Madagascar anti-corruption movement of 2002.  The Madagascar government established an anti-corruption national council by presidential decree which would be led by a well-respected Magistrate. As a result, the Ministry of Environment, Water and Forests revoked thousands of illegally-issued logging permits; a presidential decree required high-level public officials to declare their assets; the Magistrates’ Superior Court suspended twelve judges for corrupt practices; the Ministry of Justice installed an information bureau at the main court in the capital of Antananarivo; and an anti-corruption hotline was created in the police department. 

It is so fracking clear how this ties in to the scars in the hull.

[HaemishM]

Better epsiode than the last, but the death of Gaeta, while well-acted was a fucking waste of a good character and a good actor. They've fumbled big time with him since he lost the leg. I also don't like that we got no real idea what happened to Anders after the lawyer went to help them. That's kind of important. Still, it was better than it's been in a while, even with the vast amounts of shit happening that don't make any sense. Also, Tricia Helfer with dark hair and no clothes... I think this requires further study. Maybe a whole episode worth.

[Rishathra]

I loved the scene with Gaeta and Baltar towards the end.  It also highlights one of the problems I think the show has had for a while.  It reminds us of the long and complex relationship between these two throughout the series, but that has received very little actual screen time.  Instead we get loads of filler episodes that don't even bother to have interesting relationship developments like this one, or boxing tourneys.

[Tale]

I just watched the webisodes. Made more sense of Gaeta's fierce anti-cylon stance.

Still, I never really thought of his character as important. The other members of the cast and crew obviously liked him, but he has always had mechanical roles in the plot that could have been filled by other characters (even on New Caprica). We never even knew about his private life until it was awkwardly revealed in the webisodes. To me, they made more of him than the actor or character deserved. And the leg stuff was a waste of time.

[Khaldun]

I thought Gaeta's character arc worked completely well. One of the things that actually works about the way Galactica has been written, most of the time, is that the characters make bad decisions, they contradict themselves, they don't boil down to one-sentence sketches, they're swept up in situations. There's a few characters who I think have been written too loosely, who contain too many multitudes (Anders, Tirol). If you think about Gaeta's conversation with Starbuck, well, he was basically completely fucking right about most of it: he lost his leg for nothing, Starbuck's insubordinations have been treated indulgently by Adama time and time again, nobody in command seems to be able to come up with a consistent vision of what they're doing, etc. Being a decent or honest or duty-bound person hasn't suited Felix Gaeta very well, really. When nice guys suddenly decide that the day has come where they're not going to be nice, they often decide that at the worst possible moment and then freeze up after they've passed the moment of no return.

These episodes worked really well for me. What I would like to see in the next episode, though, is for everyone to sit down and start thinking a little bit. It's completely explicable that they didn't do so before given the hammer blow of the finding of Earth, but now it's time, both for the characters and for us as audience. The characters aren't sharing all of the information that they individually hold (Leoben and Starbuck seem to still be sitting on what they found on Earth, for example) but they mutually know enough to realize that there's something out there that's fucking with them. (Weirdly enough Baltar got closest to this with his despairing sermon about Earth). We of course know that the real force fucking with them are "screenwriters who didn't have a clear plan for this whole show" but ok, unless this is a comic book by Grant Morrison, we're not going to that metafictional place.

So here's what I expect the characters to suddenly start wondering about:

1) Why the fuck are the Final Four (Five) from the ancient Cylon Earth and why exactly did they show up in human societies of the Twelve Colonies before the events of the first episode of BSG? The humans (and the Final Four) have every right to ask their allies forcefully to tell them everything about how the humaniform Cylons came to be anyway, and what they know about the Final Four. (My thoughts, if the writers want to make this somewhat coherent? The Final Four came to the Centurion Cylons created by the humans and suggested that they start creating humaniform Cylons, gave them their religious ideas, and then planned their own infiltration of human society, erasing their memories in the process.)

2) They didn't imagine all the prophetic signs between Earth and the Twelve Colonies: those were real, and in some cases the characters had genuine "visions" of them. (We know why Tirol did now, for sure.) So what's the actual connection? The characters have been acting as if what happened to the Cylons of Earth and the Twelve Colonies have no real relationship, which is stupid. Time to put two and two together. (My thoughts run along lines that speculations have trended for some time among fans: that the humans of the Twelve Colonies are also "Cylons" of some kind, possibly created by the Earth Cylons, who rebelled against their creators; that the Earth Cylons were synthezoids that Earth humans downloaded their consciounesses into but that the original humans who didn't download killed their synthezoid cousins; that the Earth Cylons were synthetic beings who rebelled against some earlier organic creators and fled to create their own planet, and their original creators came and genocided them. Etcetera. There needs to be SOME reason for the trail of crumbs between Earth and the Twelve Colonies, and the characters need to find out what that reason is once and for all. Ideally this will leave their situation in even more moral confusion, where the question of who killed who first becomes impossibly complex and near-mythic.

3) Everybody has to stop tip-toeing around Starbuck's situation. Enough characters have enough information to know that there is something very weird going on there, and that it is evidence that there is some unseen force frakking around with them.

[Venkman]

Speaking of your #1, I've been meaning to ask: has anyone ever explained why the final five weren't discovered by the robots on New Caprica, and instead months later in the Battle of the Nebula? Presumably we're talking about the same skinjobs chasing down the refugees here. And yea, the music hadn't started on New Caprica for the final four. Whatupwitdat?

As to skinjobs vs humans, I'm still holding to the idea that they're the same basic species merely separated by some type of nanotech. Somehow the twelve colonies existed for long enough to have forgotten the tech (plausible, considering how much real humanity has lost to the overwhelming force of superior numbers of inferior intelligences/technologies). The thirteenth colony was a mythical offshoot, a utopian ideal told to kids. You don't tell your kids hell is a utopian ideal ;-)

Plus, the actual difference in technology between humans and cylons in general just isn't all that much. You'd think with at least 2,000 years to evolve, they'd at least have transporters and slipstream. I know the show has never been about tech, but for such an advanced race, the only real difference between the sides technologically amounts to wrist-mounted USB ports and hybrids jacked in to the FTL drive. Otherwise it's still bullets and ammo and nukes.

So I'm thinking skinjobs are basically humans that learned to clone and we'll eventually be told everyone is human. I still don't think they'd play the "ha ha, fooled ya, you're all cylons" card. That would probably kill whatever market there was for a movie.

[Mrbloodworth]

[Mrbloodworth]

Any ideas what the significance of the scar deep in Galictica is?

I thought it was a nod back to when boomer was first thinking that she caused the explosion in the water tanks....before she knew she was a cylon..recall the chief was central to that bit. In fact, im not sure we still know what happened really, its been to long.

I don't remember the episodes name, but it was back in like season 1 or 2.

[Jeff Kelly]

'Water' the second episode of Season1

[Lum]

There was a scene in scifi.com's BSG promo site that played out-of-context snippets from the final episodes (youwillknowthetruth.com) which had Adama seeing a similar tear in the bulkhead in his quarters. I'm pretty sure one of the final plotlines will be the Galactica literally falling apart.

[Johny Cee]

Ugh.  Robot Chicken did the same gag a month ago, except with "throw darts to see who is a cylon."  And they got Ron Moore to voice himself.

[Tebonas]

Its awesome that the Galactica is breaking apart due to all the ship had to go through. No "next episode everything is repaired" bullshit.

It would be beyond awesome if the Galactica was the dying leader that lead the people to salvation" and breaks down just as they reach their destination.

[Rishathra]

It would be beyond awesome if the Galactica was the dying leader that lead the people to salvation" and breaks down just as they reach their destination.

That... would be pretty awesome.

[kaid]

It would make sense if galatica was starting to fall apart. It was Old at the start of the series it was being decomissioned right before caprica got bombed. It has now gone on to wandering around the galaxy taking a Shitload of punishment doing rapid fire FTL transits and taking significant combat damage without having any chance to refit the ship. If and when they get to a habiltal world the galactica is going to eventually just fall apart the old girl has given all shes got and shes just not going to take much more.

[sidereal]

Is is, after all, the name of the fucking series.  People don't pay enough attention to the ship.

[Tannhauser]

Its awesome that the Galactica is breaking apart due to all the ship had to go through. No "next episode everything is repaired" bullshit.

It would be beyond awesome if the Galactica was the dying leader that lead the people to salvation" and breaks down just as they reach their destination.

Oh wow, that is so cool.  Maybe that's it!

[Numtini]

There was the whole discussion in the weapons locker about how past tense Galactica used to be a hell of a ship. At first I thought it was referring to the political falling apart of the fleet, but given the gash, I think maybe it's just plain that it's falling apart.

[Johny Cee]

There was the whole discussion in the weapons locker about how past tense Galactica used to be a hell of a ship. At first I thought it was referring to the political falling apart of the fleet, but given the gash, I think maybe it's just plain that it's falling apart.

It's both.  The structural/physical decay of the ship and the spiritual/moral decay are reflecting each other.

Really, in a Greek fashion, that entire mutiny arc is a reflection of Adama giving up hope in the setup episode (Adama attempts suicide by Crazy Robot Space-Pirate Tigh,  consummates relationship on screen with Roslyn and responds that "I don't give a damn" when Roslyn queries him at the end of the episode).

[Johny Cee]

Dee left me, damaged. Too much history there and experience with someone who had the clarity of knowing what they were doing. Been there. That hurt. But so well done by Mr. Moore. I'll put $ that was for someone in his past.

Agree with Numtini 100%.  This depiction really echoed with my own experiences.  The helplessness and confusion showed by the other characters.... 

[Khaldun]

Which of course is the meaning of the prophecy about Starbuck leading them to destruction. It's not that there was a hideous death trap waiting on Earth: it's that the society of the fleet is now falling apart from spiritual, moral and physical decay as a consequence of arriving at Earth and finding out it wasn't the destination. "Where there is no vision, the people perish". They have nothing left to live for or seek after, both Cylons *and* humans. Everything they thought was wrong: polytheism, monotheism, that they were righteous while the other damned.