I saw this at a local shop:
some sort of fifty shades tie–in… BOO!
But I didn’t recognize the production-- until, purely out of curiosity, I removed the slipcover.
Yes. It’s the Joe Wright version. You know, the guy who’s infamous for using COLOR in his movies. The guy who’s so attentive to lighting that even his action movie (Hanna) looks like a bloody masterpiece…
Anyway, I’m watching some Dalziel and Pascoe. Reasonably good adaptation-- I like Ellie…
Thats from Mitchel & Webb!!
As is this:
Finished first season of Battlestar Gallactica. Doubleplus meh. What was all the fuss about?
I felt a serious lack of sense of wonder in this show, which is what sf is supposed be all about. They seemed to use the same sf elements show after show, IMO. I just got really tired of the dependence on pure conflict between Colonists and Cylons.
I disliked the lack of resolution of many of the plot threads, not just at the end of the season (where so many things were left unresolved) but the continuous lack of sense of resolution, due to Cylons hiding within the colonists. At any time, the writers could say “Hey, we need something for this week’s show; let’s have another secret Cylon appear.” And of course the whole Gilligan’s Island style of the show (“if we get back the show’s over”) is a minor annoyance anyway; even ST:Voyager did a better job, what with seeing all sorts of neat things on the crew’s journey back home.
One thing I did think was neat was Starbuck managing to steal a Cylon ship. It was cool that it was an organic machine. But her ability to fly it after fiddling around in its innards for an hour I found completely implausible. She managed to control it by squeezing vessels and pushing organs and so on. I can’t believe it would be that simple. If it was organic, its thrusters and so on would be controlled by something analogous to a nervous system – especially since the Cylons used human DNA to evolve their new bodies. How could Starbuck control it -properly- without a direct neural input?
I got tired of the silliness of Balthus and his visions/whatever of Number 6, and the stupidity of the Cylon detector/non-detector subplot. And why did he need plutonium? Given his obvious instability, I don’t see why the Commander didn’t have an armed guard watching him 24/7. That seemed like just incompetence. The increasing spiritualness of the show annoyed me; as a plot element it was simplistic and reminded me too much of the Bajor in ST:DSP (which I also disliked.) What planet (or worse, group of planets) could have only one religion?
So all in all, I thought the show was pretty poorly done. Perhaps that’s because the concept was flawed; I don’t know. But it sure looked beautiful, though. 
a lot of the things you have problems with became clearer as the series went on, but judging from all you’ve said, yeah, i don’t think it is a show for you. it was (rightly, imo) viewed as one of the best sci-fi shows to come out in a long time, but YMMV of course.
Romeo and Juliet both die.
I’m not surprised – and I may look at plot summaries somewhere just to satisfy my curiosity. As I said above, the show was well-produced – but from my point of view, the science fiction wasn’t handled well. But I see your point about it being one of the best sf shows to come along. There just haven’t been that many (at least back then; now there seems to be a renaissance of good TV and movie SF).
Did you watch the mini-series/pilot first?
Yeah, we watched it from the very start, pilot, mini-series and all.
yes, exactly – and to take on something that previously had become shorthand for “just BAD” as far as sci-fi shows go and successfully reboot it was really gutsy. i credit that show with helping turn the tide and start making hollywood reconsider sci-fi again. i really don’t think we’d have shows like The Expanse without it.
You’re probably right, that and Bab 5. And BG certainly grabbed an audience.
The best robot series I’ve seen so far has got to be Humans. And it probably owes a debt to BG as well.
Oh, wow. Let me list all of the ways I disagree with that.
Disagree, 100%. SF is, in a nutshell, about exploring today’s issues by asking “What if…?” about tomorrow. Yes, you can show wonderful things along the way, but wonder itself is less important than the “novum,” the way(s) that that world is different than this one, to compare and contrast the world around you with the fictional world.
Let’s take Star Trek (the Kelvin timeline) as an example. The 2009 film was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed it, but it really didn’t explore any profound ideas. Into Darkness was worse, in that it also avoided exploration of any profound ideas, but wasn’t even fun. Beyond, on the other hand, really started asking questions about duty, and honour, and strength, and what they mean, and how they can be used to justify horrible things. The previous two films were excellent spectacles, but Star Trek Beyond was the first of the new series to be good sci-fi.
Or Looper. Looper is not about time travel, it’s (in my view) about taking responsibility for your own actions and about how someone willing to hurt the innocent in the name of punishing monsters will just create more monsters. It just uses (frankly, stupidly broken) time travel to explore those themes, and does so so thoughtfully that you don’t even care about the stupidity of the time travel.
Well, yes. All of the really cool stuff was implied to have been left at home. I don’t really think that “able to come up with a new piece of technobabble every week” is a particularly good selling feature. Again, SF is about “Who would we be if…?” more than “OMG this is a cool thing that could totally never happen but this is TV so we can write a story where it happens.”
One of the major themes of the show is “The terrible things we are willing to do in the name of defeating our enemies.” It was a potent message at the time, and is still relevant today. It’s kind of hard to tell stories with that theme unless you set up a clear enemy. If you’re willing to stick it out (although I don’t recommend it if you hated the entire first season), they begin to take steps towards human/Cylon peace when the resurrected Six who shielded Baltar from the nukes meets Boomer.
They can only do that twelve times. There are only twelve Cylon models. At this point, you’ve met #6, #2 (Leoben), #5 (Doral), and #8 (Boomer/Sharon). Unless you think, after the incident in episode 6, they’re not sending out alerts to look for someone with a familiar face. And, if it makes you feel any better (massive spoiler here), five of those twelve remain hidden until near the end of Season 3, so there are only three faces left to expose.
This ain’t that kind of movie, bruv.
I’ll give you that. It was stupid. I can’t see how you’d seize upon that but not the massive inconsistencies throughout Voyager, but it’s a fair criticism.
Yeah, that’s fair.
The impression I got was that he only asked for it because Six told him to (because she had use for it as a bomb), but once she made the suggestion, Baltar thought of a legitimate way that it could be used to detect Cylons.
Watch him do what? The only person who’s been shown to be remotely smart enough to keep up with him is Gaeta, and Gaeta’s needed on the bridge. Unless you suspect that Baltar’s going to detonate the nuke, and why would he? He’s been cleared of any involvement with the Cylons, and has been consistently shown to have a keen sense of self-preservation (which, if you’re not involved with the Cylons, means not blowing up Galactica).
In Bajor’s case, it’s probably due to having gods that actually interact with their believers, through the Orbs. Not believing in the Prophets would be Flat-Earth Atheism. On the other hand, the Colonies have the whole Greco/Roman pantheon (who appear to have been actual historical personages back on Kobol), plus the monotheistic Cylon god (worship of which happened in the Colonies well before the Cylons were created).
I don’t think you’re judging it fairly. You seem to put a higher value on the flashy, optimistic, technobabble aspect of sci-fi rather than the reflective, thoughtful aspect, which, to my mind, is missing the entire point of the genre. And, if that’s what you value, then I agree, BSG is not going to measure up in the slightest. But I think that’sa matter of personal taste rather than a matter of writing the whole thing off as “poorly done.”
you articulated a lot of things that i agree with in defense of the show. it’s been a decade (or more?) since i’ve seen it, but it’s still one of my favorites. it’s hard to articulate how on-point the show felt post 9/11, when the fear of terrorists in our midst and sudden attacks felt much more immediate and raw, and the question of what lengths would we go to without losing our humanity was something we really were grappling with. it was the undercurrent of dread for the entire show.
No they didn’t
I’m with @kxkvi here. The show didn’t work as SF and it doesn’t really work as horror either. The Cylons had no plan, the writers were making it up as they went, it was all style and no substance. It was just a soap opera.
Not true. It was a stupid plan, but they (or, at least, the Model 1 Cylons) had a plan.
Oh, God, please don’t get me started on Lee and Kara. Those two ruined absolutely everything good that they ever touched. Both of them, apart, are the worst. The two of them together make me wish that the Cylons had been more thorough.
Very key thing to remember about BG if you’re comparing it to something like Voyager or Gilligan’s Island: the colonists don’t know whether or not Earth exists. They’re not trying to get “home”. They’re chasing a myth. It’s like the Renaissance Europeans going to look for Utopia or Eldorado or Shangri-la, except those were all undertaken by exploration parties equipped for the search and a vague idea of where to go, whereas BG is a floating, wandering refugee camp spending a lot of time under attack.
Mix in the late 70s conspiracy theories that aliens visited Earth in ancient times – aliens the ancient Greeks and Egyptians mistook for gods – and there’s the fun context: a people we on Earth will remember as mythological looking for our planet, which to them is mythological, despite their advanced technology and better-recorded history.
None of which is going to change your mind of course, but since we’re getting to talk about the series 
Ah, that makes my mind up for me; I’ve had quite enough of soap operas masquerading as Scifi or Fantasy to last me quite some time.
My search for the next ‘bingeable series’ continues.
I just finished the second season of The Expanse a couple days ago and heartily recommend it. I didn’t find it very soap opera-ish at all.
I’m also an unashamed fan of Steven Universe. It’s sweet and funny and keeps getting deeper and deeper as it goes, with occasional stabs RIGHT IN THE FEELS and breather episodes. The production schedule is all shot to hell thanks to Cartoon Network, so at this point it’s wait a few months and get 2-5 episodes, and it’s starting to feel like certain webcomincs I got caught up in that never freaking update. But there are quite a few to catch up on, so it’s bingeable.
The cast of Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica, along with series executive producer/showrunner Ron Moore, reunited for a Q&A panel at the Austin Television Festival this past weekend, where a question was posed - “What was the Cylons’ plan?”
“There was no plan,” Moore laughed.
“It all came about when we were doing the main titles and we had to have what’s called a ‘precap’ as opposed to a recap,” he said. "So we had a precap before the main title. And David [Eick, executive producer] said we should have a punchy line there at the end…‘and they have a plan.’ And I was like ‘What does that mean?’ He said ‘It doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. It’ll be great. The audience will love it.’
“I said ‘But they don’t have a plan, David.’ He said ‘Trust me, this is marketing. We’ll figure it out later.’ So for the next fourteen years of my life people have asked me ‘So what was the plan?’ There’s no fucking plan!”
ETA: @kxkvi: Canonically, if you ever do decide to watch BSG from beginning to end, you’re supposed to end off by watching The Plan.
Don’t.
Just… don’t.
Thanks so much for your enlightening comments! I think actually we are wanting the same things from sf, but with different emphasis.
Agree completely. All good written sf does this, and the best visual media sf does too.
I must have not been clear. I don’t prefer flashy optimistic technobabble over thoughful reflective sf! I mean to say a “sense of wonder,” of the kind we get with movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Arrival . I think these movies were excellent “what if” experiments, were thoughtful and reflective, and had a fabulous sense of wonder. On the smaller screen scale, ST:TOS had that on a weekly basis, IMO. Well, most weeks. And of course in novels there’s plenty of time and space to have a sense of wonder, thoughtful musing on the future, and a good story. Many authors have managed it – Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Charles Sheffield, James SA Corey are some of my favorites who have managed it. (You can see my bias toward hard science fiction.)
I shouldn’t have said poorly done – I think what I really meant was that some of the elements of BG could have been done better to my liking, as I indicated above.
