Battlestar Galactica

[tazelbain]

Obviously the Hendrix version is much better but the point of BSG isn't to listen to popular music.  The Cylon Earth version is very effective at creating eerie zeitgeist for series. 

[Numtini]

I hate Hendrix, I'll take the BSG version over either Hendrix or Dylan.

[Samwise]

[Tale]

There's too much confusion

[sidereal]

Hm.  Did you see Hera ram the little Battlestar Galactica model into the little Cylon Basestar model at the beginning of the episode?

Foreshadowing, I say.

[Tale]

Hm.  Did you see Hera ram the little Battlestar Galactica model into the little Cylon Basestar model at the beginning of the episode?

Foreshadowing, I say.

[Venkman]

Heh.

I didn't see Hera "ram" the Galactica into the ships, I just saw her sorta jump/move it to land in range.

This episode felt like a setup for a can't-we-all-just-get-along ending. Three or four people said variants of "human, cylon, what's the difference".

[palmer_eldritch]

Hm.  Did you see Hera ram the little Battlestar Galactica model into the little Cylon Basestar model at the beginning of the episode?

Foreshadowing, I say.

[Numtini]

Last ep all the spoiler tags were for the current (already broadcast) ep. Can we have a hint on whether its spoilers for someone who hasn't seen the already broadcast ep or future ep or? Oh, nevermind.

[Venkman]

Where are page 10 of the thread. Spoiler tags don't really seem relevant. If you're coming to this thread before an episode, you're reading to see if it's worth 42 minutes of your life to watch it. If you're coming to this thread after, you want to discuss it.

[Numtini]

I just want to make sure I'm not seeing something about the last two episodes...

[Oban]

I just want to make sure I'm not seeing something about the last two episodes...

Everyone dies.  I just saved you 84 minutes of your life.

[NowhereMan]

Also they come back and then they die again. Jimi Hendrix gets involved somehow but I sort of dozed out somewhere in the 12th series. This has all happened before hasn't it?

[Triforcer]

Everyone dies.  Then, Starbuck wakes up.  She is wearing only a white toga and is lying, face up, in an endless desert.  Someone walks over to her and blocks out the sun, but her eyes can't adjust.  That someone hands her a bottle of water.  At first, it looks like her father.  Then Anders.  But as her eyes finally focus...she sees Jesus.  Then, as she gets up, everyone from the whole series is there.  She runs toward them and there is a group hug.

Fin

[Rishathra]

Everyone dies.  Then, Starbuck wakes up.  She is wearing only a white toga and is lying, face up, in an endless desert.  Someone walks over to her and blocks out the sun, but her eyes can't adjust.  That someone hands her a bottle of water.  At first, it looks like her father.  Then Anders.  But as her eyes finally focus...she sees Baltar, who it turns out, is Jesus.  Then, as she gets up, everyone from the whole series is there.  She runs toward them and there is a group hug.

Fin

Slight correction.  Otherwise, spot on.

[Sky]

Covering my eyes, not reading this thread:

My local time-warner just picked up Sci-Fi.  Fuckers. I had the DVR set up to record BSG on UniHD, along with Stargate Atlantis....they moved UniHD to a different channel, which fucked up my recordings. I missed the last season of BSG and two seasons of Atlantis.

[Raguel]

More religious babbling from Baltar. That's exactly what I wanted in these last episodes.

[Rishathra]

I love every single scene Baltar has been in since the miniseries, except for every single scene where he spouts that totally insincere religious mumbo jumbo.

[Lum]

I love every single scene Baltar has been in since the miniseries, except for every single scene where he spouts that totally insincere religious mumbo jumbo.

I think the point is he's starting to believe it himself.

[Rishathra]

If anything, that makes it worse.  For the record, I get what they are trying to do with his character arc, and for the most part, I approve.  His growing humanity and ultimate redemption is something I've been personally looking forward to for a long time.  I just wish they didn't go with the Pimp Daddy Jesus angle.  Not because I'm anti-religious or anything like that, more that the presentation of religious and spiritual issues in this show has always been very clumsy and hamfisted.

[Triforcer]

Do you really think they are going toward redemption with him?  I think Caprica Six was right- he has not changed one bit from what he was or ever has been.  "Redeeming" himself is just another play- maybe not for external power, but for internal validation of how great he is. 

[Riggswolfe]

Do you really think they are going toward redemption with him?  I think Caprica Six was right- he has not changed one bit from what he was or ever has been.  "Redeeming" himself is just another play- maybe not for external power, but for internal validation of how great he is. 

I think it's pretty clear they are going for redemption. Would old Baltar have ever admitted his flaws to Roslin? That's just one of many small moments that has showed that he is truly changing.

ETA: It is BSG though so at any moment he could go back off the rails, but since they are wrapping things up I think it's unlikely.

[palmer_eldritch]

I alwaus felt sorry for Baltar. He was always an arrogant prick but his real crime was letting a pretty girl manipulate him, who turned out to be a cylon. The rest of it stemmed from his guilt following that, and fear of being discovered.

[Rishathra]

I always felt sorry for Baltar. He was always an arrogant prick but his real crime was letting a pretty girl manipulate him, who turned out to be a cylon. The rest of it stemmed from his guilt following that, and fear of being discovered.

This.

It's pretty clear to me that he wants to do the right thing, it has just proven more difficult than imagined due to his inherent egotism and cowardice.  Often times, when he does actually get himself to do good, he usually screws it up, because he just doesn't know how to do it, having had little experience.  The most recent example being his ill-advised public outing of Starbuck.  Still, he has been growing, bit by bit, throughout the series.  Thus, I look forward to his redemption, but don't necessarily expect it, because it is BSG after all.

[Khaldun]

I continue to have problems with the Final Five as characters. Well, at least with what being the Final Five does to them as characters. Not Saul Tigh: he makes sense over the whole of his arc, including his irritation towards *being* a Cylon and his skepticism about what Ellen's trying to get him to think and be. Not Samuel Anders, who has been a moderately consistent hunk of dumb meat for most of his time on the show. Not Tory Foster, who is so much of a cipher that she can barely be said to have a character arc, but inasmuch as she has any personality at all, she's got a willingness to be machiavellian and self-interested that's pretty consistent, and for all we know, very much how she was before Cavil inflicted amnesia on her. (I mean, where did Cavil *come from*, after all? Did they just cross the wires and whoops, we bred a fucking monster? Or were some of the Final Five not the World's Greatest Mentors and Parents?)

But Galen Tyrol?

Look, only two things make sense about him as possibilities:

1) He was always a catastrophic fuck-up even back on Earth, and got a ride on the resurrection ship just because he knew the Tighs and was in the right place at the right time, maybe because he had some technical knowledge that was useful to the project.

2) Cavil's brainwipe hit him worse than anyone else, and he's been a stew of emotional fuckuppery ever since--that he's the equivalent of someone who survives a catastrophic brain injury but suffers from some severe emotional disequilibrium as a result.

Otherwise, seriously, it makes no sense whatsoever that this is a guy who is a two-thousand year old visionary survivor of a doomed planet who planned a breathtakingly ambitious attempt to interrupt an ancient cycle of antagonism between synthetic and organic lifeforms. If there is a character on the show who has suffered more from the "throw a dart at the board to see what happens to him this week" syndrome, I dunno who it is. Maybe Apollo, I guess.

[Venkman]

I think Apollo suffers mostly from being a main character without an appropriate role. Not once they blowed up the Pegasus. After that it was obvious he'd go into Politics, but I suspect the Writer's Strike screwed up the pacing of that. Or at least that's what I'd like to believe. I blame that also on Roslin's on/off cancer, and Adama getting too often into the obstinate/emo emotional flipfloppery. I agree with you that Tigh is about the most consistent character on the show, next to Baltar. And on Baltar, I agree that he's generally trying to manage the inner conflict: survive and do the right thing. So far he's always leaned towards survive, at the expense of the right thing. If they're trying the redemption thing, he'll off himself in some final show of belief/martyrdom.

Tyrol's a trainwreck. Not sure what they intended with the character but they didn't get there. I think he was just into the realm of "main character" enough where he couldn't be killed off though. Or it's in his contract.

[Khaldun]

Tyrol basically started off as Scotty with Cylon girlfriend. Ok, fine. So he can get all emo about that for a while, I buy that. But then? Fucking carwreck randomness. Either make the guy:

1) Working-class drunk car-crazy motherfucker who did a shotgun marriage with the Shelly-Duvall clone who offed his robot girlfriend and subsequently spiralled down into shitbag madness after New Caprica because he has no idea what's going on any more. Cool. Works. DO NOT MAKE THIS CHARACTER A CYLON. Maybe if you want, make HIM the Gaeta--not a military rebel but somebody who tries to lead a working-class rebellion against Adama.

2) Make him a Cylon, fine. But then ease up on the guy: don't make him the dramatic lever that gets Boomer out of jail. That was just too much soap operatic, too much larding on one more layer of incomprehensible dramatic character development that just really didn't fit. The guy should be moving towards resolution of his arc, towards being a better person, towards recovering whatever he was as a creator of a new race of people, and instead he's spiralling down toward supreme toolhood. It just doesn't add up.

[Rishathra]

In Tyrol's defense, I'm immensely fond of Aaron Douglass, and his performance of the character.  It's more a problem of what the writers are doing to the character than the character himself.

[Khaldun]

I think he's done a great job playing the character, absolutely. It's just that his character doesn't make any sense any longer: he's the worst victim of dartboard-writing on the whole show.

[HaemishM]

In Tyrol's defense, I'm immensely fond of Aaron Douglass, and his performance of the character.  It's more a problem of what the writers are doing to the character than the character himself.

That's really been a lot of the problem with the show since New Caprica. Fantastic performances based off of REALLY SHITTY WRITING. I can't say that any actor on the show has done badly. The material given them has just been so off since New Caprica, bordering on downright shitty most of the time.

[Rishathra]

I won't say that it's a valid excuse, but a lot of the more batshit plot and writing decisions make much more sense when you listen to Ronald Moore's podcasts after each episode.  He gives what sounds like a reasonable explanation for why this or that happened the way it did.  His reasoning, however, only holds up as long as you are just talking about the show.  When you then watch the show afterward, no amount of reasoning can protect you from the  .

The one bit that actually works somewhat for me is to be reminded that these are a bunch of people who watched their entire race get wiped out, and have spent the following four years either cooped up in a windowless box eating fungus, or living in a police state run by the very same executioners of their race.  You can't expect them to behave all that rationally.

[Khaldun]

Except that they haven't really written the show that way either, as an exploration of a group of refugees all going slowly mad together over time in a way that made situational sense. At times, everything has in fact been way too fucking normal. We'll go for a whole slew of episodes where everybody seems to have 3 squares, a bottomless amount of good alcohol, and decent enough living conditions, and then suddenly the writers remember what the situation is supposed to be and everything is grimy and desperate and the characters get some circles under their eyes for a while. For a while, some characters will be perfectly normal and then they won't be. I mean, FUCK, they've got what looks like a regular old organized day care nursery school aboard the Galactica rather than a bunch of desperately ad hoc arrangements involving old people and relatives and stuff. If that's just a privilege that the top military people get, then take us off Galactica more often to show us how things are elsewhere, because *that's* where revolutions really come from.

I love the show when all is said and done, but like Babylon 5 until it went off the rails in the fourth season, it's the closeness to getting it *really right* that bugs me.

[Fordel]

I swear to GOD, if the Galactica doesn't shoot SOMETHING soon, I'm going to explode.

[KallDrexx]

This whole season has been full of fail, wtf.

How can you fuck up the final episodes so badly when (for the most part) the rest of the series was so good.

ugh.

[HaemishM]

I spent the whole hour saying, "You've got 2 shows left and THIS is what we get? Baltar fighting with his dad? Lee and Baltar in a room talking about how selfish Baltar is? FLASHBACKS OF ROSLIN AND HER DEAD SISTERS? CAN YOU NOT JUST GET THE FUCK ON WITH IT, FOR FUCK'S SAKE?"

This is the kind of episode I expect in midseason 2. This is not a proper penultimate episode. At least the finale will be 2 hours and I can have one more hour out of my week back.