Topic: Previously on Battlestar Galactica

[6pairsofshoes]

I don't really know how delivery services and supply chains are even the issue if all habitable places were bombed with nukes and therefore not able to be used to produce food because they are radioactive.  They are on this New Caprica planet and it seems too grim to produce food, but they have a city that looks like it was built under New Brutalist architecture, kind of like extensive London County Council housing.  There's no plants.  No animals.  (Except the dog.  Where did the dog come from?  Didn't see any pets on the ships.  But, whatever...)

Why everyone was running around on Caprica without radiation poisoning, including the "skin" cylons, is god's own mystery.

Now I'm on Season 3 and the whole thing is so drearily predictable.

I'm sort of amused that Kara gets to kill the patient cylon every day and he gets downloaded into a new body.  He's got the faith that she'll love him eventually as long as he tries hard enough.  It's like a K-mart version of Almodovar's "Tie me up tie me down."
Gotta say, that cylon is more interesting than most of the men she's been with.  And she's cut way down on her drinking.

Back on the ship, we can tell the passage of time by Olmos' moustache.  If I were them, I'd just start reproducing like rabbits.  There's a few women on board, so you'd expect them to get busy.  There's no guarantee they'll be able to free the humans on the planet from the cylons.  Besides, given they don't communicate, how do they even know there's anyone alive to be rescued?  Gotta save the species.  Should be easy, given the mysteriously endless supply of food and booze.  Correction:  they just communicated with the ground, so, there you have it.  Only a year later.

The music is hard to listen to.  I mute the screen a lot.  The Japanese drumming is so annoying.  That and the whiny Celtic woman poo we have to listen to.  It's either whiny droning on or bang bang bang.  Two speeds with nothing in between.

[8ullfrog]

Armenian.

A distant sadness is one of my favorite songs. I get it, you hate it, but it moves me.

That being said, screw the soundtrack version. They jammed in some of that watchtower mix, and I could do without it.

But the scene in occupation in which it shows up, that was a hell of a thing.

Tigh me up, Tigh me down is an episode you've already seen.


Jake is essentially the last dog. His food bowl is used to pass information from the Baltar administration (Mostly the cylons) to the resistance.

The stupid planet people are on an escalator down to not existing.

Fat Lee, Commander PEGASUS, says exactly what you did. There is not a chance in hell they can rescue the people on the planet, it's fully blockaded against the battlestars.

Admiral Adama, Galactica, says they wait.

[6pairsofshoes]

OK.  Sorry about the negative comments.  I think that if I listened to the song without having it used to manipulate my reception of a tv show, I might like it better.

Thanks for the info about the dog.  Why did the son get so fat?  He comments about working out on the treadmill near the end of the episode when they're all back seem comical.  Did the actor have health issues?

I thought it interesting that the cylon who had basically enslaved Kara used some other person's child to try to get her to stay with him.  The cylons seem to be just as screwed up as the humans they tell themselves they wish to replace with their better selves.

Gaius seems pretty screwed at this point with blondie dumping him & only a cylon robot for company.  There's something essentially creepy about the red laser scanning back and forth in the robotic visor and I'm trying to remember why and what it reminds me of.  I'm plowing through season 3 and find the writing around Hera, the hybrid child, seems pretty well done because it leaves open lots of room for speculation.

The cylons have her so what effect will that have on the child and what will Sharon do when she realizes that the President had the baby taken away and farmed out to a human to raise.  I expect she'll be mighty pissed and possibly out for vengeance.  Lots of threads that could lead some interesting places.  The issue of hybridity is curious and a number of sci fi films/shows deal with it.  But the oddity here is that the child exists at all.  I am deeply curious about the cylon biology.  How do they manage to develop fertile women robots?  This is not addressed, but it's worth explaining, even if speculatively.

I think that most of the androids in the Philip K D ick books are grown in vats.  There's no explanation of how these cylon creatures come to exist.  The intro/title sequence just says they were created by man, but then, they "evolved." That's like tossing a scientific theoretical bomb into your living room with the hope that you won't notice it.  I hear that and say "come again?"  are you talking about natural selection in devices that do not reproduce except in baths of flavorless gelatin? 

Oh well.  I guess I shouldn't hold a tv show to such rigorous standards.  It's fiction after all, but if it aspires to these concepts they should at least deal with them in a reasonable or serious way.

[8ullfrog]

This vehicle was designed by Michael Sheffe, a toymaker for Mattel. Sheffe and his crew were given only two weeks to design and build K.I.T.T. before shooting began. It was barely completed in time before shooting because Scheffe and his team had no time to order custom parts. They had to purchase materials locally or fabricate items themselves with equipment and materials on hand.

 The pulsating red lights on the front end of K.I.T.T. were taken directly from the Cylons of classic Battlestar Galactica. They modulated according to eight different pre-programmed patterns that could be varied with whatever mood directors wanted K.I.T.T. to express.

emphasis mine.

https://www.neatorama.com/2011/06/03/15-facts-you-might-not-know-about-knight-rider/

[6pairsofshoes]

Maybe Gort.  That robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still?

Never much of a Knight Rider viewer.  Although I've been told that Germans love David Hasslehoff.

[8ullfrog]

interestingly enough, NBC tried to revive Knight Rider because of the success of nBSG.

It didn't go well.

[6pairsofshoes]

Since there's plenty of discussion of the potential extinction of mankind, may I assume that humans left Earth for some reason?   The 13 colonies of Kobol presumably were colonized by earthlings but there's not much explanation for why there are no people on Earth if that is the case.  Also, if there was a good reason to leave Earth, why is it now so desirable to go back there?  The series does not seem to offer much of a background on that.

I've been flying through the episodes, kind of like the Steely Dan song, "Reelin in the Years."  Maybe there will be an explanation eventually.  What was the deal with the 5 cylons in the temple in Algae land?  What was the mysterious communication with future cold storage cylon girl?  And did Galactica get enough algae to nuke the place?  First one problem arises, the solution comes, and then another problem comes that brings a solution seemingly destined to recreate problem #1.  Nuke the place and where do you get the next batch of food from, or is that magical algae?  Eat it once and you'll never be hungry again, like mannah from heaven.  Or am I just being too critical?

Here's a corrective. 

  Soon to be featured on dontdatehimgirl.com

[8ullfrog]

Okay, this once again is a lot to unpack.

Algae planet finally answers your "Where da food" question. They needed the horrible algae paste because the prior food supply was contaminated somehow. It is not in fact, poop. 


New Caprica DID produce food, and had what stargate likes to call "Space deer". Which are regular deer, but we're on another planet. Hence, Space deer.


New Caprica was mostly a very cold inhospitable place, but it had a temperate zone near the equator, which is where they colonized. We know that farming was fairly easy in this zone, as explained when Admiral Adama and Former President Roslin smoked a doob. The network got super pissed about that scene. I don't see why, it's not like they're smoking anything illegal, after all, it's an Alien Planet, and they're not American.

A lot of the farming equipment was left behind on New Caprica, so they're in bad shape wherever they end up. They were on New Caprica for one year and six months.

The eye of Jupiter is, I guess, the last rest stop? Remember how the chief talked about the religious significance, and that scripture said it was going to be destroyed, and then it blew up?


The final five cylons do not in fact, know that they are cylons. Cavil wiped all memory of them after he killed off one of the models. They are in fact, the first cylons.


The future cold storage cylon is not any of those things. She's "The hybrid" essentially, every cylon basestar has one. She's like the central computer. You may notice her ramblings resemble maintenance schedules.


So the food supply is now finite. The algae planet was destined to blow up. We now know that the supposed scripture is in fact, a script. The colonials are being led down a path. This is not necessarily a good path. Their gods are huge assholes.


That's actually something they already knew, but chose to ignore.

According to their scripture, the 12 colonies of Kobol were colonized after the gods did something so bless'ed terrible, they doomed themselves, and sent off the colonials in 13 ships. One vanished, creating the myth of the 13th tribe, also called "Earth".


Their home was known as Kobol, but they were NEVER supposed to return, under a threat of a blood price. Which in the show was literal. Every ship that landed lost at least one person.


So now they're looking for earth to make it their new home.


I do find it interesting, and a bit of a cop-out that RDM never explained what it was that the gods did that was so terrible.

[6pairsofshoes]

Thanks, 8ully.  That explains a lot.  But the woman I'm talking about that got boxed at the end of the episode when the sun supernovas on Algae planet is not to be confused with the woman lying in the bathtub babbling who is running the ship and connected to whatever by a series of flexible pipes.  I'm talking about the competitor for Caprica 6 with Baltar who is also a toothsome blonde but more evil and conniving.   She ends up getting boxed for having messianic delusions that threatened the communal mindset and overall cooperative governance of the cylons.

As for the gods doing something terrible, that's a new wrinkle on things.  Why they worship the ancient Greek pantheon is also curious, but it beats the Sunday morning evangelical nonsense that the cylons spout.  So "Earth" in this case is not what we know as the home planet but some kind of mythical place where the 13th tribe (who left the temple on algae planet as a way station with traffic directions) rested?

BTW, I've just finished reading the two Homeric epics and am on the Aeneid, now, so the intervention of the gods as people try to make their way home, or in the case of Aeneas, to a new homeland when their original home (Troy/Illium) was destroyed, has considerable resonance for me.  The gods are fickle and constantly screwing with humans, so it's sort of engaging that the writers of BSG pick up the mantle of the ancient poets in this series.

[8ullfrog]

D'anna Biers is model #3.  She first showed up as a reporter for colonial fleet news service, and prior to the nukes, was friendly with Laura Roslin. She often cracks inappropriate jokes, but Lucy Lawless said she always wanted there to be an undercurrent of cold creepiness.

She's had some fairly MASSIVE plot points so far. Most importantly, she recovered the game ball (Hera) from New Caprica, and has recently begun a hobby of recreational suicide that seriously creeps out the other cylons. She also enjoys long walks on the beach and torturing Baltar with an electric toothbrush. Then she decided to have sex with him and go even crazier.

Also, she broke concensus. Technically, Sharon (finally got her own last name) Agathon had already broken concensus because she really enjoyed sex with Helo, and decided to do it for free, instead of just doing it for work.

Plus Six loves Baltar, and whoops that wasn't supposed to happen!

As to the religion, The colonials actually know their gods are real, because the gods lived alongside them before the horrible oopsie, and sent them out on colonial ships.

Not sure if this comes from fanfic, but those ships did not have FTL. That trip probably sucked.

One of the lines of scripture they curbed from JM Barrie is "All Of This Has Happened Before And Will Happen Again"

Dunno if they stole the idea from Babylon 5, or if it's meant to be original, but it kind of brings a hamster wheel to mind.

[6pairsofshoes]

Wow I thought that #3 looked familiar, didn't realize she was Lucy Lawless, or Xena, Warrior Princess.    She gets a lot of work.

[8ullfrog]

What do you think of her twisted take on faith? She was killing herself to see her creator. Turns out, she actually was!

As to Hera, it was implied that Baltar will be the one stuck raising her, all the way back on kobol during season 2. What does this mean for the Agathons? (Sharon and Helo)

[6pairsofshoes]

The request to Centurions to shoot her in the head and then wipe their memories of it was certainly strange.  The continual rebirth and whacky utterances upon revival were also odd, and clearly unnerving to the other cylons.  What ever the apology and references to beauty in the Temple on Algae planet prior to the place being destroyed flew right over my head.  She's on the floor along with Baltar and the Galactica guys retrieve Baltar but leave Xena.  I guess they had more of a beef with Baltar that needed settling?

I just saw the episode where Kara encounters creepy male cylon and her dead mother in some kind of regression therapy that cured her fears enough for her to meet her destiny by what appears to have been a massively self destructive trip into a planet's atmosphere that offered to crush her like a bug.  The only virtue being that she was "no longer afraid."  Of what is anybody's guess.  Her mural?  The creepy cylon?  Death?  Mommy?  Go figure. 

I suspect this is yet another device where she's going to show up again like a circus trick in a later episode with an epiphany, but who knows?  For now, I'm waiting for the younger Adama to get all lawyer like and defend Baltar so that he gets off scot free.  Why not?  Hence the joke, "what do you call 5000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?"  A:  "A good start."

I did like the Algae Meat Loaf that Chief and Spouse had for dinner in a recent episode.  Not much else on the food chain problems, lately.  Maybe more on that later?

[8ullfrog]

They actually didn't write Baltar's return to the fleet, and in fact, were super pissed that the crew came up with it, but it was slick as hell using the bodybag. NBC (Who paid for quite a bit) asked who came up with that, and RDM took full credit, while secretly being pissed that he didn't come up with it.

 No need for some bombastic "Turn him over, because we say so" "Well, he has been an excellent house guest, didn't even madam about the torturing, but he is super self absorbed"

So Baltar is in the hoosegow.


My guess is D'Anna got degaussed by those revelations. I used to love hitting that button on the CRT. Was probably bless'ed it up, but it was a fun button to hit. She's dead as hell from that, btw.

So you watched Starbuck commit suicide. She actually warned everyone in the S3 blooper reel:

I particularly like Aaron Douglas, who poured his heart and soul into the show. Like on another level. Wil Wheaton talked about visiting the TNG experience in Vegas, sitting at the helm, and palming it like he was actually driving somewhere, and I think Aaron douglas had that connection to BSG.

So when he says "Yeah, we'll get on it tomorrow Commander, Admiral, whatever the golly you are" That is just the perfect line. Wish he'd said Frak, then they could have put it in the show.

[6pairsofshoes]

That was pretty funny, and it is cheering to see how the actors recognize how melodramatic the show is.

At the end of Season 3, Kara pops  up like a circus trick and says, "relax, everything is going to be fine."  She knows where earth is.  That's useful.  I'll probably move onto season 4 tonight.