Battlestar Galactica: The new movie + pre-Season 4 thread

[Relic]

ETA: I'm praying to God that I'm wrong, but they let me down hard in Season 3.

please Will. Dont be naive. This show gave helo (the greatestest acted and written character in sci fi history) more air time to appease the female demographic watching. Yes, to APPEASE the viewer. Compromised all integrity for ratings

Compromised convoluted crap. That was season 3.

yeah im bitter, the more i think about it. They should have moved the show to HBO after season 1.

[Werthead]

SPOILER:

If they cannot explain why Tigh is a Cylon, even though he is old enough to have fought in the first war before the cylons had the ability to create "skin jobs," this wonderful show will have losts all meaning to me.

Hang on, this is the Season 4 thread. Why spoiler stuff from Season 3?

I gather that:

SPOILER: Razor

Either Razor or the flashbacks have a pretty major clue towards exactly when the Cylons developed the skinjob models.

Otherwise it's not a major issue. It's pretty clear that the Cylons existed before their supposed invention 50-60 years ago (since otherwise it was a bit difficult to have a temple to the Final Five Cylons in existence 3,000 years ago) and that the Final Five are substantially different to the other Cylons. Even if they weren't, the earliest verified contact anyone had with Tigh was when Adama met him roughly 20-22 years ago, so it's inside the bounds of possibility that the Cylons deliberately created an 'old' model humanoid Cylon back then.

I'm much more interested to see how the hell they explain the Final Five getting the jobs and positions that they did. Coincidence or conspiracy?

[Sad King Billy]

I'm much more interested to see how the hell they explain the Final Five getting the jobs and positions that they did. Coincidence or conspiracy?

All part of God's Plan....

[kedlav]

All part of God's Plan....

You mean that they were conveniently placed to be interesting enough when they had to scramble for the final five once it became clear season 4 was it? Most of the selections make little sense and show just how little planning was actually involved from mini -> end

[Lord O' Bones]

just how little planning was actually involved

Ed Zachary.

[Werthead]

No Wert, its a major issue. Its a show-breaking issue; you don't just call someone a cylon and then rewrite the story to say that Cylons invented skinjobs during the first cylon war. That is stupid as hell.

The Cylons clearly existed before their supposed invention in the First Cylon War as long ago as Season 1. All this has happened before and will happen again? A bit difficult for it to have happened before when one of the main factions did not exist at that time.

Also, whilst RDM said that apart from Tyrol they hadn't chosen any of the Final Five before the start of Season 3, they did know that the Final Five would be characters we already knew as far back as the first season and hedged their bets as to which they would be. Lame? Yeah. Anders makes sense (one of the Final Five, in presumed opposition to the Significant Seven, leading a rebel force against them on Caprica) and so does Tyrol (his arc in Season 1 and particularly the stuff in Season 2 about him fearing to be a Cylon all set it up well beforehand). Tory is more problematic. Presumably Billy would have been a Cylon if he hadn't been booted off the show (one of the Final Five establishing himself as the future President's aide, if we're assuming the Five conspired to have Galactica survive the attack, which is cheesy but the ONLY way anything in this show makes any sense). Making Tory fit that role is much trickier. Maybe the retcon is that Tory was always on Roslin's staff and we never saw her, and this was the opportunity for her to step forward and take up a role important to the Cylons?

Tigh is the big problem and probably RDM should have made it someone else (Gaeta?). Although I'm wondering if Adama's actions in Razor interest the Five (either at the time or retrospectively) and make them want to put someone close to him. It's a stretch but frankly this show does a lot of that kind of stretching and always has done.

The Final Five are the polytheistic gods of Kobol. How many have been mentioned? 5, as far as I recall.

Were these people cylons before or after they got their jobs? I dont think they were.

Kobol had 12 gods, as established in the Kobol arc from Season 1/2. 6 or 7 have been mentioned by this time.

Either way, they are going to have to write themselves out of this pretty hardcore.

And it will be either convincing or very lame. However, they've given us 2 good seasons and 1 bad season (which still had some great episodes), so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

[Relic]

Although, Season two was pretty fucking good. Its hard to say. My biggest doubts come from the fact that it was last season that was bad.

Scar, Black Market (aka Apollo P.I.), The Miracle Cure, Starbuck dual wielding and shooting Apollo, the dues ex machina appearance of new caprica (or whatever they called the planet they settled on) that gave Baltar the win so that the writers could write some occupation episodes...the lame conclusion to the BSG/Pegasus showdown. Lots of crap crap crap in second half of season 2.

[Shryke]

You people are so goddamn bitter.

It's really amusing.

[Relic]

You people are so goddamn bitter.

It's really amusing.

And you have an av of a cat gettin tortured.

Im happy to amuse, i spose.

Bitter isnt even the word. Sick of commercialized crap is a better way of putting it. Ive been bitching since season 2, yet continued to watch in hopes of this show finding the magic that made the first 22 or so episodes hot shit.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Relic,

Scar, Black Market (aka Apollo P.I.), The Miracle Cure, Starbuck dual wielding and shooting Apollo, the dues ex machina appearance of new caprica (or whatever they called the planet they settled on) that gave Baltar the win so that the writers could write some occupation episodes...the lame conclusion to the BSG/Pegasus showdown. Lots of crap crap crap in second half of season 2.

How is it DExM to find a planet that is habitable? It's fortuitous but not DExM in my opinion. Heck, it's only the second habitable planet they had come across in a year of space travel.

[Relic]

Relic,

How is it DExM to find a planet that is habitable? It's fortuitous but not DExM in my opinion. Heck, it's only the second habitable planet they had come across in a year of space travel.

its a device used to establish multiple, and for the most part, predictable plot lines...and their resolutions. The worst was that it led to the election of Baltar, whiich i got the feeling the writers REALLY wanted, but couldnt figure out how to plot.

What bothered me most bout that episode tho, was the detonation of the nuke knew went missing.

[Kalbear]

It was a predictable plot line to jump a year into the future?

[Relic]

It was a predictable plot line to jump a year into the future?

no, i didnt see that coming really. but the escape, no matter how cool was predictable, no? the planet floundering under Baltar, mr enemy of the fleet, was likewise pretty obvious.

i dunno, imho, sloppy writing.

[Kalbear]

I did see the rescue coming, but it didn't matter. I saw the Pegasus coming back and it still kicked so much ass that it didn't matter. The launch into the atmo was just too damn cool.

I didn't see Tigh becoming OBL either, nor did I see him having to execute his wife.

Yeah, I figured that once the fleet was split they'd be rescued, but we dealt with that for what, all of 4 episodes? It's not like we spent a ton of time there. It's like they knew that this was a predictable outcome and they said 'fine, we're going there, but we'll get through it quick so that you can keep on guessing'. Baltar being a mess at leader was something predictable, true, but he rocked at it.

I mean...at some point, predictability isn't bad if it's done well. It's predictable that Baltar is going to be a bad leader, but you want to see how bad he'll get. It's predictable that the humans will be rescued, but that rescue rocked.

[Werthead]

I've given up trying to determine what people find predictable. I'm still shocked that people didn't see Ned's death coming from a hundred pages off, for example. Agreed that Baltar being elected was a bit obvious though, especially since many of the writers worked on DS9 (where again they put two major 'villains' - Kai Winn for Bajor and Gul Dukat for Cardassia - in charge of their respective planets even though in both cases it was clearly a mistake).

Whilst the escape was predictable, even down to the Pegasus buying the farm, it was still pretty cool to watch and it was with a pretty hefty cost (counting Cloud 9's destruction more than 8,000 people - nearly 25% of the survivors of humanity - were killed) that did have ramifications for the rest of the season.

[Anya, Vengeance Demon]

One could just as easily object that the Galactica was obviously going to survive the Cylon assault in '33', that Roslin clearly wasn't going to spend all of season two in jail, that they're going to find the way to Earth, that Admiral Cain was never going to win, etc., etc. And when you were done there, you could start on other targets as well: the Others are going to lose, for example. At a certain level of abstraction lots of movies, TV shows, books, etc., are predictable.

[Relic]

One could just as easily object that the Galactica was obviously going to survive the Cylon assault in '33', that Roslin clearly wasn't going to spend all of season two in jail, that they're going to find the way to Earth, that Admiral Cain was never going to win, etc., etc. And when you were done there, you could start on other targets as well: the Others are going to lose, for example. At a certain level of abstraction lots of movies, TV shows, books, etc., are predictable.

yah, yer right there. Thing with BSG is...it wasnt even written well after a certain point.

[Paddy]

I also don't understand the "issue" over the nuke that blew up Cloud 9.

They know it was the one that was in Baltar's lab.

Baltar was kinda busy with a whole lot of stuff that had him be away from his lab around that time.

Obviously, the miliary should have been guarding Baltar's lab, but I don't see it as anywhere close to not believable that they weren't able to. There really aren't that many soldiers there and it's pretty well established that they are stretched very thin, though it's definitely dodgy that they didn't search the Cylon Sympathiser with his big case as he left Galactica, but given that they didn't, there's no reason for them to tie that incident to the explosion.

I just cannot see were the incident is not internally consistent. It doesn't even come close to the bounds of my suspension of disbelief.

As for the "predictable destruction" of the Pegasus: at the time, the fan speculation had determined that Pegasus would be destroyed at the end of Resurrection Ship Part II and then that it would be undone by the nuke. Keeping it around so long was rather unpredictable and personally, I thought that the way they got rid of it in the end was damn fucking awesome.

[Lord O' Bones]

As for the "predictable destruction" of the Pegasus

Were you old enough to watch the original series, you knew the Pegasus was done for eventually. Admiral Cain as well. The way they stretched the original story arc from two episodes to several, without ultimately changing the Pegasus's demise was awseome.

[Werthead]

Interestingly, RDM now says he wishes they'd have kept the Pegasus around, but they were backed into the corner by the fact all the Pegasus sets were taking up space in the studio for other stuff they needed. OTOH, having the now-heavily-damaged Galactica shepherding the fleet to safety is much more tense than if they had a state-of-the-art battlestar watching over them.

Speculation that the Pegasus would be destroyed in its first few episodes was influenced by the fact that those episodes remade (to a certain extent) the original series story The Living Legend (Cain was played by the immortal Lloyd Bridges - "I knew I picked the wrong day to stop being a fascist chump"). In that story the Pegasus blew up two Cylon basestars with nukes at the end of the episode and it was left left unclear if it had survived or been destroyed in the explosion.