Topic: Previously on Battlestar Galactica

[6pairsofshoes]

It wasn't clear if they were a sports team or marines.  They determined that they weren't cylons by asking them about how a game was scored and what plays won it for them.  Then they go on to the court.

It just seemed like a group of script writers who didn't know what to do next.  Sports are popular.  Let's work in some sports.  Everybody likes sports.  And I'm thinking there are murderous robots running around and radiation, so why aren't clumps of their hair falling out and why are they making so much noise?  I'd be more paranoid and more careful in their place as well as plotting how the hell to get out of there asap.  But that's just me.

[8ullfrog]

Yeah, turns out Six actually liked going to sports games, so that was dumb. I feel bad for Michael Trucco, he shows up here as a foil between a possible relationship between Lee and Starbuck. Then on Castle, they brought him in as a foil between a possible relationship between Beckett and Castle.

Castle, that was a creepy damn' premise, but Nathan Fillion is so charming. They really should have made him a serial killer like on buffy, or Angela Lansbury on Murder She Wrote.


Sports team aren't planning to get off planet, they plan to take as many cylons with them as possible. They're super dumb.

Funny thing is, I really like the next arc. I still hate the sports team. Nothing on Cylon occupied Caprica was worth the trip. Except Helo.

Funny thing, he wasn't meant to be revisited. The last time we were supposed to see him was when Boomer lifted off. That was really supposed to be the end for Caprica.


An NBC Universal exec tracked down RDM (Show boss of BSG) and asked what was goin' on. When RDM told him Helo was dead, he strongly implied the budget for the show was dependent on Helo not being dead.


So it's entirely possible everything you hate right now was because of that nameless suit.


Besides, Bill Adama preferred a different team.


I know the nuke thing is bothering you, but seriously, it's magic meds. Plenty of shows pull that poo.


As to them making enough noise to bring the heat down on them... well...

[Reply happened while posting]

Well yeah, the fleshy cylons WERE designed for infiltration and sex, hence human form. ONE we haven't met yet bitches about it constantly. Like in a teenage "I didn't ask to be born!" kind of way.


If it makes you feel better, there were cylon tanks that just had that red visor thing to distinguish them from contemporary tanks. Oh, and the Nanny bots absolutely shredded children in blenders and crap. Dunno if the blenders were cylons, that's kinda inching towards Michael bay Transformer insanity, what with the mountain dew vending machine decepticon, or the Xbox 360 decepticon.


I'm surprised neither of you complained about the glowy spine sex, that was a huge complaint during the series, to the point the producers ass pulled an "It was meant to be illustrative, not literal" explanation.


I just realized another reason Starbuck is a selfish madam. The Cylon FTL's are supposedly better than the colonial ones, they could just use it to plot the jumps and punch it into the shitty colonial FTL manually, drastically extending their range. This is never done in the series.


It's kinda like how Tony Stark is horribly wasted flying around in stupid armor punching things with the Avengers, when his greatest weapon is clearly his mind.

[6pairsofshoes]

Magic radiation medicine is a trope that reappears in other apocalyptic series, most recently, The 100, where young people on a ship are sent to Earth which is supposed to be highly radioactive, although somehow they manage to deal with it, except for weird acid rain storms.  They have evolved beyond the effects of ionizing radiation.  How?  Your guess is as good as mine.  That doesn't mean it's excused as a physical impossibility.  The FTL drives?  I have no idea what they are.  They seem to take the leap into hyperspace like the Millenial Falcon or something.  FTL is a nice acronym that nobody bothers to explain.  Like of course we all know what that stands for, so we won't bother to tell you.  It's kind of like California street signs.  You're driving and get lost and there's only the names of streets that you are crossing, never the one you're on, so you can drive for miles saying, "where the hell am I?"

Red radiating spines during sex seem sort of odd in that they ignore where blood really does concentrate during sex.  The spine ain't it although I guess it was easy for the special effects guys to layer on red over the naked spine of the actress for emphasis.  Like hot robot sex.  Funny, chrisT's observations about the lack of necessity to design anthropomorphic robots are spot on, but I guess realistic asymmetrical robots that are well designed for function don't make such good tv.

I took a philosophy of mind course one summer and most of the other students were computer science people.  The question of where consciousness arises and how was central to the course.  I had another professor in a phenomenology course who insisted that the integral relationship between body and mind rendered the prospect of realistic AI well nigh impossible.  Unless you come up with computers that are so close to synthetic humans to make the jump.  I guess that's what Philip K. D ick and other writers who deal with the subject in stories like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep were getting at.   But the replicants were essentially organic, with body parts grown in vats, giving rise to creatures that mimicked humans both in terms of memory and emotion.  I suspect that's what happens with the more sympathetic characters among the cylon AI number series.

I just finished the episode where Adama decides to go bring his people together by going to help out the President find the tomb of Athena (Artemis?).  Gak.  I forgot to lay by a store of ipecac for the episode.

[8ullfrog]

Aw, I liked the tension in the episode, and the debt of blood being proven true again. The fact that a Cylon understands their scripture better than they do is an interesting point.

I also like the mystery of the planetarium.

Specifically, their scripture says anyone who lands on kobol has to pay a debt of blood. When the raptor went down... well you remember. Then when everyone joined the scavenger hunt, one stepped on a mine, fulfilling the prophecy. I mean yeah, in both cases more people died, and it had more to do with screaming instead of talking things out, but zareks goons are more plentiful than redshirts on star trek.


They really should have accidentally'd Zarek for that crap.

[6pairsofshoes]

That episode had a good deal of potential that remained unrealized, but I agree with you that it was interesting that Sharon knew much more about their scripture than they did.  The planetarium consisted of the zodiac being somehow the origin or expression of the 12 clans or whatever they're called.  I assume there were 12 ships or planets they occupied, with the Capricorns on Caprica, or what have you.

Also, Sharon recognized their dark nature and its fallibilities.  Whatever you might say about this crew and the civilians, they're far from heroic in the classical sense.  She offs the evils and hands the gun over to Adama.  The whole lot of them seem kind of lame.  I did like the arrow fitting in the bow of the archer in the temple.  So many of the sets for that were kind of meh, but I'm a fan of ancient architecture so it didn't do much for me.

But everyone's a critic.  And I guess if I wanted to do a show like that, it's hard to say what I could have come up with.

[8ullfrog]

I know you mentioned not being a fan of the music, but you've just watched the episode with one of my favorite songs ever.

There are about four songs from BSG that are important. One is a stunt piece, but this one was just general ambiance when Sharon was talking.

As to what she said to Adama "And you ask why" actually answers him twice. Once, in the decommissioning speech, he asked why humanity deserved to live.

The second time, he asked Boomer's corpse "why" as in, why did things have to be this way. Galactica was kind of the garbage posting for officers. The cast offs and misfits. Boomer wasn't a great pilot, and she broke regs frakkin' the chief, but Adama saw a lot of potential there.


A big part of BSG is not being star trek. RDM was promised he could do voyager his way. When he found out that wasn't true, he walked. There are a lot of notes that voyager hinted at that BSG sold.


also keep in mind, they were constantly fighting the SciFi channel at the time about tone, budget, and anything else you care to imagine.


One line they fought for in this episode that got cut, was that Chief can't read maps worth poo. In a throwaway line, Aaron Douglass said that "Topography is for pussies". Obviously, this didn't fly with Standards and Practices.

I kinda dug the steep hills and vivid greenery, but holy poo do they overdo the frakkin' opera house. That thing shows up right til the end.

[8ullfrog]

Nah, hyper sleep is when you don't have Faster than Light.

Actually, I believe the jump drive got a bit of a shout in the miniseries. Galactica herself hasn't done a jump in 10 years, and it's not exactly common for commuter traffic.

Apparently the military does train their forces for the transit discomfort (Cally bitches "I hate this part")

Things stretch out, as scifi tends to do with incomprehensible science, and then they all get smushed through the hole that just got punched in space, Harry Potter style.

To elaborate, teleportation in Harry Potter is called Apparition, and involves a feeling of being passed through one's own belly-button, or Navel, as the brits term it.


So those jackasses live a life in Victorian conditions when they can bless'ed teleport. Morans!


There could be any number of fully cromulent reasons for not using FTL. Maybe the envelope your ship is protected by during this reality hole punching is extremely flammable when they meet element of the week? Then you can't fly through there, can you? You've got to reroute, and that's gonna cost you!

Maybe previous use of the area has damaged space in such a way, FTL just doesn't work? Star trek pulled this one, but they got around it eventually. Or ignored it. They probably ignored it. Warp 6 speed limit it was. Wouldn't be surprised if they did it to stop baby writers from always pushing the Enterprise-D to MAXIMUM WARP!

As to gender politics, I've not seen Passengers, but I hear Mr. Pratt comes off very Jack Torrence in that one, and it probably won't lead to another minifig. (He's one of the most prevailant lego figures, because of all the franchises he's in now)

There's also using cryo-sleep because observing FTL travel drives the users insane, as seen in Stephen King story - "The Jaunt". Quite the mini-mind golly that one was.



Anyway, the colonials haven't bothered updating the tech, so they're flying around with 8-trac FTL drives.


Cylons of course, have i-Pods, and listen to cool stuff, like The Killers. also, they can go back to Caprica whenever they want, so NYEH!


I poo you not, that's why Starbuck was able to go back so quickly, Cylons have better jump drives.


Aww crap, I forgot to mention Screamers. Screamer has your battle-bot nightmare snake buzz saw robots. And humanoid robots! Which are gendered as Androids or Gynoids!


Eh, I don't have to tell you but stargate used creepy spider robots.

[6pairsofshoes]

It's interesting to hear about the background context of writers vs studios and network suits struggling for control over the series and its impact on the end product.  I haven't heard of Passengers (at first I thought of Travelers, but that's not a question of space, but time).  I'll have to look into that one. I don't think it aired in the U.S.

Thanks, also for the FTL info.  I hadn't a clue, but it makes much more sense now.

[8ullfrog]

I'm pretty sure they did an exposition scene where Adama says "Pull out the jump charts" and Tigh goes bug-eyed and says the ship hasn't jumped in ten years. Then Gaeta exposition explains the jumps, and how they're going past the red line, whatever the frak that means.

Point of fact, I don't think anyone really uses FTL all that much. From what I remember the colonies are in one solar system with two stars.

I don't know what the civilian purpose of having your ship rigged for FTL, but maybe I'm completely wrong, I never watched the CAPRICA TV series since I heard they dropped the plot and straight up made it a soap.


Huh I was wrong, Galactica hadn't jumped for 22 years.

Tigh: Because any sane man wouldn't. It's been, what, twenty, twenty-two years?
Adama: We trained for this.
Tigh: Training is one thing, but - if we're off in our calculations by even a few degrees, we could end up in the middle of the sun.
Adama: No choice. Colonel Tigh, please plot a hyperlight jump from our position to the orbit of Ragnar.

Passengers is a film. It's got Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence.

[6pairsofshoes]

When the series first started they were all staying awake for many many hours and jumping every 33 minutes to stay ahead of the cylons.

I looked up Passengers in Wikipedia and found a BBC show by the same name -- not the same thing at all.  I tried to watch the film version that you are referring to (I'd forgotten about it) a while back and had to stop after about 15 minutes.  Not my cup of tea.

Gaius makes little sense in his wavering between justice for cylons and not wanting to end the human race.  For a genius, he sure is stupid.  It was refreshing to see the cylon 6 character shoot the woman admiral in the head, given the latter's inexplicable and irrational cruelty.  That actress gets a lot of work.  She's been on Homicide, Star Trek series, in some BBC detective series as the main character's wife, etc.  Nice voice.  She does seem to have one speed though.  Not much range.

p.s.  I'm wondering where the endless supply of food and particularly, of alcoholic beverages comes from.  Those "nuggets" qua pilots sure do put it away.  Do they have some kind of advanced synthesis equipment on board?

[8ullfrog]

Lot of delivery trucks in the fleet. Chief also has a still. Space probably means not having to spend much on refrigeration. As to the beer, they probably recycle the bottles, like craft brewers. Probably a crap load of stills in the fleet.

Dang, you've really jumped ahead here, from sports team stupidity on Caprica all the way through the whole PEGASUS showdown.

PEGASUS was a damn pirate ship, but the poo she called them on was mostly accurate, aside from demoting Lee. He was a Captain before the bombs fell, and it wasn't by nepotism. Bill Adama was not well liked in the fleet, but Lee was a quiet, competent officer.

The rape gang thing is nuts though. Holy poo was that bad. Gaius doesn't need to be a cylon sympathizer to think what went down there was pure evil.

And Cain was going to have the same thing done to Sharon. She earned that execution. Funny thing, she removed the chairs in her CIC to make her officers stay alert. A richard move borrowed from the Then US UN Ambassador, and pedophile mustache enthusiast - John Bolton.

Michelle Forbes was supposed to be the Lead actress on DS9, but backed out, the role was reduced and recast with Nana Visitor.

At one point Tigh goes to shut chief's still down, Chief defends it as a solvent for machine parts. A similar excuse was used on MASH.

Tigh walks away with two bottles of solvent.

Most people in the fleet probably aren't kicking back cocktails like the viper pilots, but those poor kids work a hell of a job, and have the life expectancy of a gnat. Less when Starbuck is CAG.

[6pairsofshoes]

To run a still, you have to have something to distill, a source.  I'm wondering where their food and drink comes from.  There's no reference to it on there.  It's not like they dip down to Caprica on occasion for some delicious radiated beets and grain to keep up their beer supply and to have some tasty root vegetables.

The writers take pains to discuss issues with minerals, fuels and water supplies via mining operations and that sort of thing but I have no clue where the 48k population gets food.  It's simply not addressed.  One thing I like about the Expanse is the discussion of the various new fungi dishes they come up with in space, and then there's the coffee thing, but at least they have colonies with greenhouses and that sort of thing that clearly functions to supply nourishments.  BSG, not so much.

[8ullfrog]

It's poop. They refine the poop into nasty algae puffs. Well they do later.

[6pairsofshoes]

Sounds like a Till Eulenspiegel story.

I took a break last night after watching several episodes yesterday.  That followed a night of 1/2 hour of sleep so BSG was all I was good for.  I'm more rested today.   School starts this week, so I suspect my viewing will slack off for a while.

[8ullfrog]

I'm probably remembering things wrong. Maybe they used the poop as fertilizer to grow the algae?

Nobody likes the algae food at all. But they had a massive amount of booze. My guess is everyone in the colonies were alcoholics because of the rampant Cancer, so there were a lot of delivery trucks flying that day.

Or maybe it's like those shitty food delivery services? Where you get to pay 6X what the food is worth to have it delivered by a random person?

Or delivery is a decent job on the colonies? So you order some Tauron Beef steaks, they pop a quick FTL flight, and it's fresh off the bison, within the hour?
 
They kinda have the opposite of the automation rush that's screwing everyone here right now, they had to un-automate everything.


I really don't get how you're watching all this so quickly without burning out, only show I managed that with was Thrones. I burnt out on Gotham hard.