Battlestar Galactica Revival

I kind of hope they put Hatch and/or Dirk Benedict in a throwaway cameo role, even though it'd be kind of cheesy.

One of my most amazing and amusing discoveries when I was getting more interested in Mormonism as a social history, that subtext. In the same way that all the Christianity in Narnia flew over my head when I first read it, I had to have it pointed out to me later vis-a-vis all the stuff in Galactica that was pure Joseph Smith. So much for allegory!

I kind of hope they put Hatch and/or Dirk Benedict in a throwaway cameo role

Hatch is doubtful for reasons outlined above (though it seems Ron Moore at least is trying to keep in touch with the fanbase via him at points), Benedict I could see...

Yes, I owned a BG novelization many years ago in my callow youth -- it was of the two part ice planet/big gun episode (actually, why couldn't the damn ship have just steered somewhere else?). Weird thing was it was actually pretty good.

Best part of the reboot aspect: they get to ignore Galactica 1980, as should we all (except maybe the Starbuck/Secret Origin of Cousin Oliver episode).

Yeah, that one was actually pretty great (certainly did the same theme of Enemy Mine better than the movie version did, lemme tell ya).

What WAS the deal with Cousin Oliver? Exactly who thought it would be a good idea to cast a younger version of Paul Williams, or to even create that role? The Wesley Goddamn Crusher of his time.

This page I just found details more about why the 1980 series was as bad as it was. Thankfully I've somehow forgotten about the Super Scouts.

Didn't Richard Hatch and Glen A. Larson both have rival revivals planned at about the same time?

It did have some things going for it... I'll always remember the noises the launching fighters made from the neighbouring cinema while watching Watership Down.

no need to feel sorry abt it DV.

does anyone remember the weird later episodes where god shows up to bail them out of trouble?

Turns out the original series is also going to come out on DVD shortly.

By the way, I noticed on one of the displays on the Galactica the words popping up on the screen: "Made in USA". How's that for a civilization that hasn't found Earth yet?

Yeah, December 8. Oh, that's not ominous AT ALL! They must be trying to piggyback on the anniversary of the Immaculate Conception.

Why do you have a problem with the Galactica being made by the Universal Spaceship Assemblers, Sean?

Moby should be in this movie.

Now I just want the Galactica 1980 one with special remove-the-Super-Scouts track!

Actually, I want audio commentary by Dirk Benedict and Moby on all of it.

(Or am I?)

The original pilot is genuinely good. I'll stand by that for at least a week.

Just saw the brief ad for Monday's miniseries (it's probably on the web or something, but I have no soundcard), and it seemed to come down to this: "God didn't create the Cylons. Man did."; hey, that's a mighty Earth-like planet there, I hope it isn't actually Earth; oh, it's Mary McDonnell; "let's go kick some Cylon ass!"

I'm not sure what to think.

I miss the visual style of the original most, I think. But I'm curious enough to watch part 2.

Good Points:
1) The Battle Scenes roXor!
2) Ship design is excellent.
3) The Female Starbuck was a good idea.

Bad Points
1) The whole Cylons are now disguised as humans shtick.
2) Costume design is a bad knockoff of Babylon 5.
3) The bland bland bland guy playing Apollo was a bad idea. (I mean, shit, the guy from the original series was this Jim-Morrison looking sex symbol guy that it made sense for the hotties to be hanging all over him. This guy isn't merely bland, he's a boring actor.)
4) The whole "Cylon chick who is devoutly religious" thing is probably going to either
   a) confuse the issues by adding fake spirituality or
   b) open a can of worms by implying that the heroes are all athiests "...as all good heroes should be..."; while hamfistedly making the bad guys all "Fundamentalists."

I like the human Cylons! In theory. In moderation.

The religious Cylon thing ... boy, I'm not sure how to take that. Taking the religious subtext from the original and .. making it explicit and some kind of plot point? I guess? I don't know. We'll see how it turns out.

(Or they could be riffing off Mormon stuff I don't know anything about, to be honest.)

I will definitely catch this Galactica miniseries at some point -- if it repeats while I'm at home over Xmas, then. Otherwise I'll wait on the inevitable DVD.

Watched more of it this morning. I was quite impressed that they actually dealt with the mechanics of zero-g inertia with things moving in space and filled in the details of Viper maneuvering jets, etc.

That's hardly a sophisticated assessment, but the original show starring Lorne Greene as Adama and Richard Hatch as his star-pilot son was hardly a sophisticated hour of television.
In fact, the original "Battlestar Galactica" was a cheesy low-brow piece of science fiction entertainment that lasted only one season.
No. It lasted at least three, and had an (admittedly awful) sequel.

As in the original show, the malevolent Cylons were once a race of shiny tin cans who have now evolved into slimy creatures that can take on the form of humans.
Slime? No, they were just robots with realistic looking skin.

I told y'all that the religion aspect was going to piss off somebody.

* Ships move more like they should.

Started this with my daughter, who sat down to watch under duress - an "old" sci-fi reboot of an even older sci-fi she'd never heard of is a hard sell - but she was hooked immediately. It's at least as good as I remembered. I wonder if it was pitched as "Das Boot" meets "The Day After?"

I was surprised to be reminded that the religious/theological stuff is there in the very first episode.

Oh, she found it amusing (rightly), that in the miniseries someone actually says "OK, Boomer."

Man, felt like Cain was around for much longer than three episodes.

Good character! Disappointing that she's killed off.

Which reminds me - one of the dumbest decisions the producers made, IMO, was to put Tigh in an eyepatch. He's the best actor on the show - don't cover his eyes! Idiocy.

Also: :( https://www.gofundme.com/f/michael-hogan-fund

The Chief Tyrol/refining ship episode is infuriating. Roslin and Adama doing one of the unexplained shifts from benevolence to acting like monsters, a window into the fleet that gets three quarters of an episode, wrapped up with Roslin giving a patronizing speech.

Can't watch BG without wondering what they do with all the corners of pages.

― koogs, Saturday, September 19, 2020 2:02 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was once told in pre internet times, that the corners from all Rizla papers were shipped to Sydney Opera house to provide the snow for their annual Christmas shows...

I expect something like that happens within the fleet.

yes, the famous snow-filled annual Christmas show at Sydney Opera House

started rewatching this and it's decent but ffs we get it, baltar is a sociopath -- please, enough with watching him try to converse/make funny faces with people *and* no. 6 simultaneously again and again forever

feel for tricia helfer condemned to spend four years nibbling on dude's ear, and also for dude having to do the same shocked expressions again and again

the general lack of music/space sound -- just drums and some minor (relative to, say, star trek) sound effects -- is intersting and effective

He finally gets a decent little run in the fourth season, which overall is even worse than I remembered.

Poor Gaeta.

They just could not keep Adama/Roslin/Apollo's characterization steady from episode to episode no matter which era of the show - Adama does his "no more friends" speech to the crew and threatens to shoot people and then the next episode is all "ur like a daughter to me" to someone who isn't Starbuck and then back to shooty then a mean drunk.

and in a single episode people are asking baltar to bless their children and others are picking up watchtower on the radio

Just watched this over about three weeks.

There's a lot of punching in the face, even boxing ep aside.

Is the smoking a running gag on the 70s? Do they smoke in the old ones?

Gonna miss Baltar and Caprica 6.

Old men fist fighting and crying with booze is definitely a big part of BSG appeal.

There'a an equal amount of young women being punched in the face (and doing punching tbf) by men. Just a lot o' punchin' all round.

I suppose some of the women are 2000 years old and/or not stricty women but the optics are the same.

Anyway, grim as much of it was I am slightly bereft at being dumped back on Earth 2.

What's next - Caprica?

There must be some kind of way out of here

I'd say if you are looking for another old scifi streaming show, I would check out Farscape. It is lower budget but it is more fun and less over the top grim as BSG.

If I was an entertainment mogul looking to make my scifi streaming show, I would adapt Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars series. Kinda surprised it has not happened yet, that book how it is setup I think could work well as a Tv show.

that one's tough because it covers such a long period of time that favorite characters would always be dying/disappearing. the expanse has lots of secondary characters coming and going but there's always at least a stable core

At least you don't have to pay actors more and more each contract renewal...

I think it would take a few seasons to do just the first book 'Red Mars'. I think it would work as more of a large ensemble like BSG or Game of Thrones.

I think I heard an Internet rumour that Red Mars was in the works.

I'd like someone to have a bash at the Culture novels.

I prefer The Expanse to BSG in a lot of ways, not least because it's proper hard Sci-Fi rather than a slightly half-arsed SF/mystic fantasy hybrid, but I don't think it reaches the heights of nailbiting drama BSG did at its peaks.

I think Amazon started working on a Culture TV show and gave up.

yeah Expanse is much more...clinical, maybe? it has a coldness and to it and isn't as interested in Big Obvious Themes or goopy love triangles xp

I think Amazon started working on a Culture TV show and gave up.

― DJI,

Fair play to be honest, it would need an absurd budget to do properly.

I tend to forget, when I'm reading Culture books, that many of the characters are weird multi-legged creatures and other things that might be tough to relate to as a television viewer.

I'm guessing they would just do the typical head loaf makeup that other scifi shows do.

animate it?

That would be rad

Sounds like it was Bank's estate that pulled the plug xps

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21402585/amazon-cancels-tv-adaptation-culture-series-iain-m-banks-consider-phlebas

Got my mom started on Galactica, should I warn her about the later seasons or make it a delightful surprise?

delightful surprise

100% agree.

Maybe take a health check after the season three opening episodes, that's the jump off point before you hit the weird part of the rollercoaster.

does she like the song "All Along the Watchtower" y or n?

The only song I’ve ever been sure she liked was “Sussudio.”

the Cylons woulda given themselves away by dancing

Serial killer doctor episode in season 3 merits my mom's first 100% critical text re: Galactica.

just randomly caught the 'all along the watchtower' ep on pluto

cannot offhand recall anything more painfully corny than the four of them each taking a line of the verse, capped by rekha sharma puking and muttering 'i can't get no relief'

also i'd forgotten just how omnipresent baltar's pained squinchy eyebrows expression is

cannot offhand recall anything more painfully corny than the four of them each taking a line of the verse, capped by rekha sharma puking and muttering 'i can't get no relief'

the most shark-jumping moment I've ever seen in any TV show ever, though I watched it until the end and thought the rest of the show mostly good (though I always felt the Starbuck plotline at the end was bullshit). That watchtower shit was so embarassing.

is there any conceivable piece of music that might have worked?

(i could see *maybe*, like, the goldberg variations aria or 'ode to joy' but of course even then . . .)

anyway much funnier would have been

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in this town
See, me and the boys, we don't like it
So we're gettin' up and goin' down

Trio's "Da Da Da"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlUKcNNmywk

is AATW in this show sort of the ultimate version of "Chuck, Chuck! It's Marvin! Your cousin, Marvin Berry! You know that new sound you were looking for? Well listen to THIS!"

only if he held the phone up to a MARTY McFLY SHREDS! version

is there any conceivable piece of music that might have worked?

Get Lucky obv.

Adama addressing the bridge "We've come too far, to give up what we are"

I see it less as jumping the shark, more riding the shark whilst whipping it with cowboy hat, Dr Strangelove style.

love this show, gotta plan a rewatch with my kids now they are old enough and the Star Wars well has dried up..

Also, dropping four of the remaining Cylon reveals at once, and without any real clues leading up (as far as I remember) so that it just feels arbitrary, was dumb.

I remember thinking that the whole Bob Dylan connection was a sign that the writer was a Baby Boomer - the show ends with the notion that Bob Dylan wasn't just a great musician, he was almost literally the voice of God, or at least he was what God sings in the shower - and yet Ronald D Moore was born in 1964, which means that punk was happening when he was a teenager, not Peter Frampton. He grew up with Minor Threat and The Replacements. "Punk, Not Peter Frampton".

And in the preceding three series the Cylons had been trying to blow up the Galactica, even though the most irreplaceable members of their species were on board at the time. I remember reading that the plan was for the show to have a downbeat ending, with the crew finding a radioactive Earth, because there was a writers' strike, but then they dug out some old Star Trek: Phase Two scripts plus a bag of weed that had been perfectly preserved since 1975, and a copy of Chariots of the Gods?, and they thought "we can get a few more episodes out of this", that was how the actual ending came out.

The moral of the show is that the Sony Aibo will kill us all. And it still might.

This is also yet another example of The Melancholy of Ilxor. The OP started the thread in 2003. If only we could go back and tell them. But no, we can't. We're doomed to watch the people of 2003 blundering about in the dark, walking into things. Even if we hit the glass with a metal chair we can't communicate with them.

been watching more and more because i apparently cannot sleep ever

('HI I'M JUSTIN SYLVESTER and I'M BLAKELY THORNTON and something something THE QUEERS OF YESTERYEAR'. Donna who cackles upon making money from Vintage is kinda cute tho?)

it's been a long time since i watched the whole thing but . . . does helo ever do anything wrong?

roslin is clearly a saint and means well but she's done horrible shit. everyone else is totally compromised in any number of ways. but not, iirc, helo -- apart from disobeying orders and killing the captive infected cylons before they could sabotage the resurrection ships -- which a) avoided a genocide and b) was *remarkably* just waved away by adama

also his mouth is special. is he pouting? is he pinching his lips? there's barely any lip to work with if you're trying to discern his shit!

(pls keep in mind my not sleeping ever whilst judging this post)