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BATTLESTAR GALACTICA 3.0 is a go, apparently


Werthead

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Argh.

Previously this was going to be a companion show to RDM's BSG, set in the same universe with Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) in charge, which was quite interesting.

Today the announcement confirms it is going to be at totally new reimagining with Esmail having a much smaller role and the showrunner will be a guy whose main claim of fame is (checks notes) writing the Assassin's Creed film.

Hmm.

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Little Drummer Girl was decent , seem to remember his version of Macbeth was good. That doesn't worry me so much.

Esmail worries me though. Mr Robot was never as clever or as interesting as is wanted to be seen to be, often collapsing into pretension and an undeserved sense of itself. Even though it occasionally had exciting highs, I always got the sense that Esmail was always trying to be clever rather than create something good. 

I'm just imagining that BSG was his favourite show when he was younger, like I'm sure Fight Club was his favourite movie, and so he'll try and take all the bits he liked in the SyFy series and rehash it.. only slower and a worse ending.

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Actually heard quite good things about The Little Drummer Girl. Seems he wrote half the episodes. OTOH, no previous show running experience, so who knows.

I have to admit I got tired of Mr. Robot somewhere in its 2nd season, and never bothered with it again. Very bold and self-assured show anchored by a phenomenal performance, but Esmail's narrative instincts were on a different track from what I was interested in. So the earlier news that he was involved didn't excite me very much. 

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a worse ending? The mind reels. The ending of 'Mr. Robot' was miles better than the end of BSG. 

This is another example to me of making something again too quickly. We didn't 'need' the BSG reboot but it was mostly great. It's much too soon to return to that well vs. just making something new. Dust of 'Buck Rogers' or 'Space: 1999' if you must.  

Probably too late now but when we had so many people deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, that was the time to do a gritty reboot of 'the A-team'. 

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On top of everything I feel like the themes that BSG dealt with have also been done elsewhere now and I can’t see that there is much left to milk from that cow.

The ‘creations become the creators’ and rise of robots and AI is all everyone is talking about these days, I’m not sure there’s a lot of space to keep going over it.

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3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

On top of everything I feel like the themes that BSG dealt with have also been done elsewhere now and I can’t see that there is much left to milk from that cow.

The ‘creations become the creators’ and rise of robots and AI is all everyone is talking about these days, I’m not sure there’s a lot of space to keep going over it.

To be fair, that's not in the original BSG premise, only in the second version. In the original, the Cylons were an alien race of insectoids who had all but died out, leaving their robotic creations to carry out their last command, the extermination of humanity whom they'd been at war with for a thousand years. So they don't need to go in the direction of the Cylons being the creation of humanity again.

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36 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

I would have preferred a Homeworld show instead.

Yup, 100%. Homeworld hits a lot of the same dramatic and story beats as BSG but by completely removing Earth and any link to our contemporary world from it, and being set in a galaxy 25 million light-years away, it avoids the narrative issues that caused problems for both previous versions of the story.

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Since --if i read this right-- this isn;t a reboot/remake, perhaps they're looking to extend the universe... which, is what I would do if I owned the property... BSG as a brand always seemed to me to be somewhere between star trek  and star wars insofar as it had much of the former's human character development, and the latter's  kick-ass action... if they do it right it could be wonderful, granted, thats a big "if"

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52 minutes ago, Martini Sigil said:

Since --if i read this right-- this isn;t a reboot/remake, perhaps they're looking to extend the universe... which, is what I would do if I owned the property... BSG as a brand always seemed to me to be somewhere between star trek  and star wars insofar as it had much of the former's human character development, and the latter's  kick-ass action... if they do it right it could be wonderful, granted, thats a big "if"

It was originally going to be set in the second version of the universe (Ronald D. Moore's), but all the PR this week has been saying it's a reimagining of the BSG story, so it sounds like it's a totally new spin on the idea.

The problem with BSG is that it's a fairly small scale story, with one fleet of ships fleeing across the galaxy. There's not really a lot you can do to expand that to a Star Trek or Wars level of mythology and story-telling.

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I don't think we need any more BSG, do something else, but I agree, if you are gonna do it another reboot is better than an expansion. Doing expansions just undermines the whole point of the original remake, the isolation.


If you do a good reboot where the focus isn't the desparate stand of the last few, maybe you can spin out of that.

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I would really like them to do a show that really follows through on the desperate last stand aspect of BSG. For 2.5 seasons the show did a brilliant job of illustrating that sense of dread and finality.. until it stopped to go off and do some shit about angels.

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2 hours ago, polishgenius said:

I don't think we need any more BSG, do something else, but I agree, if you are gonna do it another reboot is better than an expansion. Doing expansions just undermines the whole point of the original remake, the isolation.

If you do a good reboot where the focus isn't the desparate stand of the last few, maybe you can spin out of that.

You could do a reboot that started more in the thick of the war and maybe you don't destroy the Colonies until the end of the first season or something, get the viewers invested in the stakes more, but that's not really where the meat of the story is to be told.

Another angle would be to move the pieces around: Earth (in a distant future) is now Kobol, the Thirteen Colonies are in different star systems and get knocked out in a simultaneous attack, and the thirteenth colony they are looking for is called Kobol and it's completely mysterious. That way you're not limiting the show to the mystery of what Earth is in that context and all the awkwardness that comes along with it (like Earth already having inhabitants in the finale, so they didn't have to deal with the fossil record showing humans have been here for millions of years and evolved here, something Larson was much more comfortable flat-out ignoring in Galactica 1980).

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Another reboot seems pretty pointless. I wouldn't mind a "forty years later" sequel to the original, ignoring 1980, though not having Richard Hatch any more makes the idea less appealing than it was.

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So there's yet another streaming channel. Great. I wonder who'll pick up this show internationally. I don't have high expectations for the show, though. To make this good, they'd have to do a lot of planning and world building before they start shooting. TV never does that. That's why the Moore show failed after showing much promise in Season One.

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18 hours ago, Heartofice said:

But what is the extended universe of BSG? All of humanity is trapped on a bunch of ships.. there doesn’t appear to be anything outside of that.

Well, were there any daggits in the last show? I do not believe there were, so that's an area that needs to be explored. 

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Throwing ideas around for another series with some friends, one that came up was a sequel where a near-ish future Earth where they discover that the Galactica and some of the other ships from the fleet did not crash into the Sun but instead crashed on the nightside surface of Mercury (where they would be relatively well-preserved). The wrecks are discovered and investigated, which leads to the discovery of FTL technology and maybe some decoding of the Colonial language. Then a threat shows up to threaten to destroy humanity and the Cylons who survived the war, who are now a super-advanced godlike AI (after 150,000 years of continuous self-improvement) show up to help save it, which eventually leads humanity back to re-settling Kobol and creating a thematic loop (maybe even an actual time loop if you wanted to go for maximum bullshit). You could have the lead ship still called the Galactica, but all the characters would have to be new.

Still feels like a retread though. BSG is an inherently limited premise and I can't see how much more you can wring out of it.

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