Topic: Previously on Battlestar Galactica

[6pairsofshoes]

I'll try some of the others.  Don't think I'm much interested in any of the Star Trek vehicles.  Kind of bored with them.  I'm sort of sad about the end of BSG but then again they had to do something as the principals were getting on in years.  4 years with terminal breast cancer is pushing it and the Admiral was no spring chicken.

Kara seemed sort of screwed by life.  The idea of "angels" coming in to further the plot development and then leaving, "poof", when no longer needed seems to fall in the Deus Ex Machina category.  The odd tension between her and Lee Adama was never really resolved, just sadly dismissed when she left.  I don't see humans facing extinction at the end, rather, they'll be ok because they are around for another 150k years.  But there are suggestions of the cycle repeating self with the robot toys, appliance commercials at the end.  And as for cylon dna, that is something I have trouble wrapping my head around.  There's no explanation for the development of the "skin" cylons, nor do we really get the leap between the mechanomorphic cylons and the "skins".  How do we go from one to the other.  The one scene where a cylon skin was advised to ask nicely of one of the centurions (or whatever the machiney bots are called) suggests that they have feelings that can be hurt, disrespected, etc.  There's a great deal of padding in the writing for this show and there was plenty of air time to address these issues, but the writers, for whatever reason, chose not to.

I kind of prefer the Expanse for that reason.  They do get into some of those things in greater depth.  Expanse is not back yet.  I have a couple episodes of Counterpart to catch up on, so I'll get back to that.

Thanks, though, 8ully, for walking me through BSG.  It was really helpful and I enjoyed the series more than if I would have watched it without having someone to air these questions with.

[8ullfrog]

Weird, you missed a shitload of stuff that was explicitly stated. The Final Five were from (an) earth. They invented resurrection. We don't know poo about their mechanical cylons, or why their world ended in nuclear fire. Just that it did, and they bailed.

They met up with the Robot form cylons in space, and created the skinjobs. The robots had been experimenting with this, but mostly just shredded their colonial captives while trying. The five bartered resurrection and meat bodies to end the war. Hence, armistice.
 Cavil was the first, and like any bitchy teenager, he resented his parents. Unlike most bitchy teenagers, he managed to murder the poo out of all five parents, reformat their minds, and plant them in the colonies. Somehow, perhaps intentionally, he did NOT know how to do resurrection, but didn't give a poo, as there were MILLIONS of copies with the skinjobs. Those resurrection hubs were PACKED.


Ironically enough, the skinjobs started treating the robot form cylons like poo, while plotting how to murder off those pesky 50 billion humans.

Later on in the series, Cavil actually fitted both the raiders and centurions with encilaphic inhibitors. No clue how that is actually spelled. The Sixes were especially appalled by this, calling it lobotomy.

Cavil also began doing something with the eights, resulting in boomer as his Manchurian candidate. In one particularly gross scene, he makes her dance around like a ballerina.

We know that the centurions are indeed programmed to hate, but maybe they have other feelings. At the end of the series, they were allowed to take a base star of their own and leave all these bent up people behind.


I honestly think you might enjoy DS9, but my mom absolutely despises Avery Brooks as Commander, and later Captain Sisko. (see what they did thar?)


In DS9, a man is deeply scarred when his entire life is blown the golly up by the borg, and asks for a terminal assignment. He is sent to the ass end of nowhere. Like 9 months at maximum warp far away. He brings with him his young son.


When he arrives, the space pope declares him Jesus. Well... the emissary, but it's held in about the same esteem. Which is both helpful, as the locals do NOT like Starfleet, and have a reason to be indignant. Their planet, Bajor was essentially a giant concentration camp for 60 flippin' years. So the respect is nice, but it is his duty as a Starfleet officer NOT to pervert native cultures by indulging this fantasy. The space pope tells him "Nah, this is totally legit, let me conference call the gods." and does.


So we meet the Prophets, or as they are disrespectfully referred to by Starfleet officers "The wormhole aliens". Nice respecting the native beliefs there, assholes.


These guys are really neat. They don't give much of a poo about corporeal beings, but kind of have a soft spot for those bajorans. They also do not live in a linear fashion, so they're kind of confused as hell to interact in such a manner. They refer to Commander Sisko as "The Sisko".


Also, they use your memory to represent themselves, so they appear as people you know, which is another level of mind fuckery. They also don't understand the concept of grief, and think Sisko is stuck at the moment of his wife's death.


Oh, and that's just the first half of the episode.


Voyager on the other hand, is "Let's do BSG, but no risks" You can see the hands of Ron Moore in the pilot, but beyond that the first season is horrible. There are some serious gems in this festering turd, such as terrorists being forced to conform to Starfleet regulations (They never really sell WHY Starfleet wins that coin toss, but whatevs, it's star trek) A redemption story for a convict (The helmsman), and the Holographic Doctor is so fantastic, they stole him for a scene in the TNG movie "First Contact". (Robert Picardo)


I think one of the reasons I don't like the expanse is that it rings hollow to me. Like I said, I watched it up until they "found" the rich girl, and it just seemed like a diet, shasta version of a better story.


I felt similarly with the last Stargate series, Universe. It seems like someone watched BSG, and took the worst elements of it, and stapled it to their show. There IS a brilliant mockery of this in a CSI episode, where at a star trek convention, a gritty reboot is announced. A bloody, dimly lit, overly dramatic showdown follows, then they cut to the audience, where Ron Moore and Grace Park (Boomer/Sharon Agathon/Athena) watches in horror. It's a mockery of when she shot Adama and it is fantastic. Shame it's CBS, so it's been scrubbed from youtube. Also, Ron Moore yells "YOU SUCK" at the guy who is a thinly veiled version of him.

On that note, CBS has a new, horrible star trek. I watched two episodes and was done with it.

[6pairsofshoes]

There are negotiations re restoring the Resurrection technology for Cavil and his guys & the Five get together to mind meld or whatever, since none of them has the full info on how to restore it.  But then Cap'n figures out that the dark haired woman spaced his wife and all bets are off.  They pull out and the whole deal goes south.

There's also references to Tigh having millions of sons, but I didn't get what that was about.  There is a good deal of this that sails over my head.  To be fair, I read all the Expanse books, so my appreciation of the show may be enhanced because of it.  Finding Julia Mao is what the private eye guy --Joe Miller got paid to do.  She's infected with the protomolecule, either accidentally or intentionally by her father.  I suspect it's the former.  She happens on the crew with the spores floating around in their ship on some asteroid.  She flees to one of Neptune's moons (I may be mistaken on some of the details) where there is a colony of miners.  She succumbs to the infection.  Miller finds her.  The Mao people deliberately infect the moon/asteroid and Miller later goes back, finds her, and embraces her, willingly infecting himself.  The many people infected on this settlement eventually begin radio broadcasts that sound like a combo of scrambled voices and music.  It's pretty weird.  Miller weaves in and out of the rest of the books where he functions as an investigator who probes how the civilization that invented all these odd technologies got exterminated.  The whole business has the odd arc of a whodunnit while the future of humanity lies in the balance. 

It's more like Dr. Pepper to me, fruity and full of fizz.

School has started back up and I'm now having to deal with figuring out windows and whether my partitioned hard drive is big enough to allow for the related programs for a software course I'm taking.  I'm pretty much of a windows moron, so it's slow going for me.  The other two courses are a piece of cake by comparison.  The upshot is that I probably won't have as much time to watch series at night.  I think I blasted through 5 episodes of BSG last night so I'm sort of tired today, but need to do more homework.  I like my classes, but getting started with that software class is taking a little doing.  Still, I'm taking it because I need to learn it.  Oh well. 

Thanks for the CSI link, I'll watch that later tonight.  Razor is next on the list.

[6pairsofshoes]

No, chrisT, I haven't read any Dan Simmons.  But after Hitler's Willing Executioners, which was drearily depressing as well as academically suspect, I'm ready for some lighter reading.  The next installment of the Expanse will be out in March, supposedly.

I watched Razor tonight, which only does a small bit to fill in some of the back story.  It plays like a couple of outtakes.  I wonder about the guy in the bathtub at the end.  The bathtub guys have it in for Starbuck.  Maybe they got a bad cup of coffee once and want to badmouth her.  It's like they shoehorn some moral philosophy into the plot at the end.  War makes us all do bad things and nobody comes out with clean hands.  Ta da!

[8ullfrog]

Razor IS a bunch of outtakes, like the scene when Lee is waiting at a transfer station and decides being in the military is cowpoo. I liked that one.


Ironically, the Military was sending him from being CAG on the Columbia to the decommissioning of Galactica. Then on Galactica he's forced to pose for a photo-op with his father, who he has a deep seething hatred for. Another fun current through the series is that the commander really loves his son, but any time they're alone they instantly descend to petty bickering at each other. They even take away his really cool Viper MK VII and make him fly a piece of poo MKII. This, once again saves his life, but reads as petty cowpoo en scene.

c, I think you'd actually like Baltar, he mocks the poo out of the typical stiff military walk so common in SciFi. Ironically, he joins the military for the very last battle, handles it pretty well, then almost kills the poo out of the relief squad because yeah, he's a civilian with a gun and no training. Kinda cowpoo on their part to just run around a corner without checking in though. They knew Baltar was holding that choke point. It's also a great "Inside the tin can" moment, as a giant explodey space battle is going on outside, and he almost gets shishkebobed on a beam when a part of the support frame collapses.


They do have him hold the idiot ball in what I think was the worst decision made in the entire series. (Most people think the return of Kara Thrace was the dumbest moment)


The guy in the bathtub is the first hybrid, and he's been freebasing god. He sees the entire path, beginning to end, and says that Starbuck will lead them to their end. He's also a really weird convergence point. Adama saw him in that butcher shop the cylons were using in an attempt to take human form, AND he's the first hybrid. Does that mean that all the hybrids in the base stars were the failed attempt to take human form, and that the "Five" are the worst criminals in the entire series?

Shaw interprets this "end" as "Death", but doesn't get to radio it in. It's a really ominous moment that is rushed through because we need to move along here.

What did you think of Shaw?

[6pairsofshoes]

Shaw seemed privileged, intelligent and ambitious as well as conflicted about the amorality she was increasingly pressured to adopt via Rear Admiral's pragmatism.  The neck stabbing with whatever was in that hypodermic struck me as particularly odd.  She and Kara bonded over substance abuse, it seems.  She went out in a blaze of glory.  Of course Lee Adama didn't think much of the suggestion that she get some kind of posthumous commendation given she had shot a bunch of innocent civilians.  She's the kind of soldier that would have done well in the 3rd Reich.

Bathtub man also works a great deal as a voice over actor.  I found him so wrinkly that he could have easily stood in for one of the California Raisins.  Good voice, that.  The booming prophecy struck me as ... a bit too much like something out of a post apocalyptic novel to take seriously.  Why should Kara lead humanity to their death?  why is she so special?  you'd a thunk there would be some basis for such an extreme position, but we don't get it.

Like Baltar, Kara is her own worst enemy.  It's hard to say if they are put in there to serve a didactic function/cautionary tale, like some kind of morality play.  Our lesson?  "Don't be like Kara."   She's unhappy, drinks too much and is unbalanced, can't manage to settle with a man, so she must be unfulfilled.  She's living with Lee's brother, engaged to marry him, right?  And her fiancé goes to sleep early and she stays up late drinking shots with Lee, nearly ending up in bed with him.  What's that all about?  I'm sure some radical feminists could have had a field day with her tragicomic aspects as limned by the male writers of this show.  The gendered aspects of discipline, strength, virtue, etc. as writ large by the more heroic figures in this series could keep a couple grad students busy in a women's studies program.

[8ullfrog]

She was Zak's Flight Training Officer. She shouldn't have been at his apartment EVER.

Zak was a poor pilot. He failed basic flight. Kara passed him. He died. Horribly.

Lee knew Kara was a flight officer, but not that she fraudulently passed Zak. She admits this sin in the miniseries, shortly before saying "It's the end of the world" in that same flippant tone people use when they say "Not like it's the end of the world."

Lee on the other hand, is an amazing pilot, but is always told he's less than Starbuck. So he's off on one of the finest ships in the fleet, and makes it to Commander Air Group. Not a minor posting, at all.

Starbuck meanwhile, is NOT Galactica cag. She's spiraling. That poker game in the miniseries would have been the end of her career.


One time, one time ever, Bill Adama admits he loves lee more than kara. When she's on that planet, digging out the brain of the raider like a jack-o-lantern, Lee thinks the Commander would have already moved on if it was him.


The commander replies "If it was you, we'd never leave".


And yup, Shaw was pumped up on some junk, and Admiral Cain probably would have gladly marched lock step with the third. Some fanfics play with this, having the colony flag for Tauron, where Cain is from, be the ol Red and white with desecrated svasti.

This obviously, does not endear the pirate admiral to the 13th.

[6pairsofshoes]

I'd forgotten about Kara being Zak's flight training officer.  That's near the beginning of the series, and now that you mention it, it does seem entirely inappropriate that she should have had a relationship with him outside of work.  Passing him was idiotic, and intended to pump up his ego, but ultimately at the cost of his life.

Why does Adama have such an affection for Kara? I thought she was engaged to Zak or something so he expected her to marry his son, hence the perception of her as a surrogate daughter.  Did I miss something there?

[8ullfrog]

Yeah, Commander Adama doesn't know Zak failed basic flight.

He gets pretty nasty when he finds out. Essentially, Adama knows and ignores the fact that Zak got into a relationship with Kara in flight school. He looks the other way for a lot of people.


So he goes to the Funeral. Ex wife... yeuch. Lee hates him... yikes... Crying pretty blonde LT. Bingo. Oh, she's a viper pilot? He was a viper pilot too! Psuedo daughter.


In the miniseries, when Lee finally loses his professional calm and decides to tear into the old man, he relates a mantra Bill Adama drilled into his sons. Pointing at the stupid plaque which shows "Husker" Adama and his two sons, "A man isn't a man... until he wears the wings of a viper pilot."



Once again, I can't find the frakkin' clip on youtube, but it's page 68 and 69 of the novelization.