Battlestar Galactica - How not to do internal consistency

This, OMG this. Sad thing was the first half of the finale was pretty dang good, then BOOM, let's fuck everything up.

You shoulda stuck with Deep Space Nine style stuff and made a show about Klingons, Ron Moore.

Whaaaat? The QT3 thread was full of people who watched this and hated it. It was the forerunner to the Walking Dead one.

Speaking of Exodus Pt2:



*drops mic, walks out of the room*

OMG I love that scene so much. I was cheering at the TV when that happened.

Fat Apollo and Moustache Adama were bestest Adamas.

The best part of fat Apollo is that he goes back to being ridiculously ripped in like three weeks. There's that scene of him and Helo at the gym and they're like "let's never get fat again, bro!"

One thing that's also sort of silly about Galactica - and pretty much all space-opera sci-fi - is the ridiculousness of the combat metaphors it uses (which is basically modern naval combat only IN SPACE). Any civilization capable of mustering the kind of energies necessarily involved in FTL should be able to direct those same energies into all sorts of hilariously destructive ways. And yet as far as we can tell, the most advanced weapons Galactica fields are mid-20th century technology (nukes).

Season 1 - Episode 7 "Six Degrees of Separation"

Ah, magic computer technology is going to "enhance" the image.

Wait, when did Adama start calling him Baltar and not Dr Baltar?

So, Adama is meeting this woman alone? I mean, I'm hoping the camera is going to pan over to a hundred armed guards because otherwise the program is suggesting that Adama missed the memo about Cylons looking human. The memo he wrote.

Wait, he's making a phone call to block her travel. So, someone makes an accusation that just happens to be levelled at the guy key to uncovering the Cylon agents, and no one thought the person making the accusations might be a Cylon agent? Fuck me, put the Master at Arms in charge, she seemed to know what she was doing. Good thing six was only making a clumsy come-on and not just sacrificing herself to take out Adama, or just kill Baltar when he walked into the lab. Actually, given the number of Cylons killing themselves, why didn't she?

You'd think centurions would have things like infra-red vision. The Cylons appear to be a robotic enemy which is inferior to mankind in every way.

So apparently the chief is too short to figure out the Cylon raider.

Why would she frame you, Gaius? Yes, a good question, madam President. Why would someone frame the only man who can build a Cylon detector? Truly humanity will flourish under your intelligent leadership.

Conclusion

I quite enjoy this one, there might be a bit too much farce for some but I like the way it finally brings to the surface that fact that the people in charge don't really trust Baltar. I like the continued suspicions of the Chief regarding Sharon. I like the contrasting fortunes of the two Boomers. I even like the way it keeps bringing religion into it, but it could all be a coincidence as well.

Oh FFS, Ron.

At least it summarises why Baltar is such a great character, even if the writers weren't always able to hit the right notes and the actor goes a little over-board sometimes with what I think should have been a more subtle performance.

Yeah... never attempted in science fiction? Even if we qualified that down to 'for a Sci-fi television series", that fails, hell, even if we narrow it down to "on the SyFy network", it still fails. Just off the top of my head, Farscape had all those things.

(As for your Baltar observations, I agree with how he was handled / acted)

I dunno if DS9 had series arcs, but it certainly had the other two.

I dunno, I think it did. It begins with The Prophets and ends with The Prophets. Whether that was all planned out (likely not), it still wraps up nicely.

Does anyone take seriously the idea that BSG's series arc was planned out? They were obviously making shit up as they went along. Which is perfectly fine; most shows do it.

Very true, and in watching it again now from the beginning, there does seem to be some decent foreshadowing, so maybe they did plan it out.

You know, I believed Moore when he said they had it planned out, so the realization that it was indeed made up as they went -- because it certainly felt that way -- was seriously disappointing.

Starbuck is an aaaannnggeeelll maaaaaan. Totally planned from the start! Not.

Wasn't this the episode where the Starbuck flies through the vacuum of space in a broken Raider where she's jury rigged the hole in the hull by cramming her spacesuit in it?

Well, it's more accurately a weird hybrid of WWII and modern naval combat. You've got your jets and guided missiles, but air to air combat is decided by machineguns and the capital ship countermeasure to fighters is flak spam. Not, say, an Aegis cruiser. Lots of modern-seeming sensor stuff, but little to no beyond-visual-range engagement capability.

And yeah, nukes being the strongest is especially weird given that material science has developed hulls capable of withstanding multiple nuclear strikes. Did the defense industry declare that the warheads they had were good enough and shuffle all their scientists into different divisions or something?

Oh that's some serious nit picking. It's nukes because people understand that. If you start expanding on "what would we have" the action on-screen becomes indecipherable to the viewer.

Babylon 5 is, I believe, the origin of this sort of thing in sci-fi. In fact I'd argue it's the best implementation of a show arc in any genre.

Yes, I forgot to complain about that. I love how they dwell on the exterior shot as if trying to convince us that would totally work.

I think there was an episode of Enterprise where they patched their hull with, I shit you not, mashed potatoes. But then again, it's Enterprise.

Actually a patch like that isn't entirely ridiculous on its face. The vacuum is outside, as long as the suit material can form a seal (and obviously that's a big if) without tearing, there's no reason patching with the suit wouldn't work.

It's far more ridiculous that they're still using nukes!

If I was Gaius Baltar I'd have invented antimatter and BLOWN THEIR LITTLE COLONIAL MINDS (and ships).

@jeffd's new obsession with anti-matter as the solution to all of humanity's problems is my favourite.

BSG for me was a series of brief moments of HOLY SHIT THAT WAS AWESOME punctuated by long stretches of "whee space Mormons yaaaaaaaay" (I know it wasn't as prominent in the remake as it was in the main series but still, tainted forever) - you occasionally got entire episodes of greatness like "Unfinished Business", but there was a lot of filler.

It's not a new obsession; it's just one that's sort of relevant to a couple of concurrent threads.

Years ago I spent way too much time in late-night conversations about science fiction trying to come up with "realistic" models of sci-fi conflict, bounded by approximately our current laws of physics. At the end of the day it turns out to be mostly about how much energy you can direct. Stuff like X-Wing and BSG and whatnot makes for great movies/games/TV/etc, but the simple reality is that given our current understandings of physics is close to correct, if you can control enough energy to where you can do FTL (e.g., you're generating exotic matter and blowing up wormholes, or you're playing around with Alcubierre drives, etc), then you can by definition direct enough energy in the form of a weapon to make all that other stuff (space fighters, etc) irrelevant. You can just use your doomsday weapon of choice on your target, problem solved.

Eg., with BSG: you have lots of jump capable starships. We've never seen more than a handful of base stars. Empty out ten of your starships. When a base star appears, jump one of your empty starships into the center of the base star. Rinse repeat. Problem solved via application of huge energy.

Most sci-fi gets around this by making FTL basically magic. OK fine, you have magic FTL. But you still seem to have immense resources, and technologically you sure seem pretty advanced. Assuming you aren't tapping truly hilarious levels of energy then the most efficient weapon you've got is antimatter. Which it turns out is pretty hilariously efficient; far more efficient than nukes, and way more efficient than bullets or whatever the hell it is the Vipers fire. So why aren't you just hurling a few antimatter pellets at that base star?

Ultimately I recognize this for what it is: I'm being a total rivent-counting grognard. And as a result I'm not really serious when I apply it to stuff like BSG, which is - at its core - lightweight space opera. I don't mean that insultingly; it's perfectly fine! With stuff like Blindsight where the author seems to be going for a bit more of a sense of realism I'm OK with being a grognard, though. Anyway, I'm done with this tangent, sorry, Quitch get back to the snark!

(Wait I'm not: we never saw more than a handful of base stars. Why didn't the fleet just empty out 10 or so ships and then use them as suicide jump weapons? I can't imagine anything good would happen if a large starship jumped into the center of a base star).

If they needed to, they could probably handwave in a minimum distance requirement (like Traveller) making it a non-viable strategy.

Grognardy realism tends to destroys fun space-opera on the blade of plausibility. It usually boils down to submarine-like combat - to be detected is to die - or huge quantities of hunter-killer space torpedo/mines, but it's always tough to defeat clouds of little bbs. And no terrestrial or fixed orbit object can survive an opponent with energy and matter to burn.

The best handling of sub-FTL environment I've seen in a while is The Expanse series (and they're very fun reads). There are bits that are good in the Reality Dysfunction series, with anti-matter being regulated and AM missiles being the most popular, but illegal, weapons able to accelerate at 40+ Gs., and ships that are collections of spheres for efficiency. But taking the fragile, pressurized meatbags out of fighters and having every ship look the same takes away a lot of the fun.

I think the big question is always, what are you fighting for in an universe of riches? Live-able planets seems to be the best answer.

Oh totally, which is why I pointed out that BSG is space opera, and thus it's OK. In general the epic space battles were my favorite parts of BSG!

I would argue the suicide tactic wouldn't be used for a few reasons:

1. Jumps aren't accurate enough. You're plotting with the accuracy to not fall into a star or planet's gravity, not hit a grain of sand on the beach.

2. You can't plot the jump fast enough. The Basestar will no longer be in the same position by the time you finish.

3. By the time they're in a position to fight back, they can't afford to throw away resources like that. They're subject to horrific overcrowding (or rather, they talk about it, then slap us about the face with that outdoor space).

That depends on how unpredictable it's course vector is.

That was just the one ship, wasn't it?

One was one too many.

Season 1 - Episode 8 "Flesh and Bone"

So, where exactly has this photo of Leowhatever the Cylon come from anyway?

Wait, so we're sending the psychologically unstable and still recovering Starbuck up against the model that "gets inside your head". Nice choice!

Adama seems to be claiming a pretty deep insight into a model he spent about ten minutes with.

And Starbuck loses control of the interrogation within a minute. Humanity is doomed considering the calibre of is leaders.

Planted a nuke? But don't you have radiological alarms? So call him on this BS. Where? What do you mean where? WTF are you doing?

Wait, sweep Galactica? So if that needs to be ordered, who ordered the sweep of the Olympic Carrier? The raiders in Season 0?

Carry out radiological sweeps? Is that a normal precaution that civilian ships can do? Why?

Starbuck doesn't seem to understand the concept of an interrogation. At least, not as the interrogator.

Wait, why is the guard leaving the room? He's been in the room the whole time. Is there literally no one else available to help bring the water?

Okay, so there's like twenty guards. So seriously, WTF?

So that sentence doesn't really work. "Let's spread out the fleet. No ship more than 500 klicks from any other ship. Let's limit the damage." So either you mean no ship closer than 500 klicks to any other ship, or you need to expand the second sentence to "Let's limit the damage, but we can't risk spreading out too far."

Ah yes, the single stupidest moment in all of BSG and unsurprisingly it's Cylon detector related. Baltar detects a Cylon and quite understandably lies about the result. Then afterwards he picks up the phone to the President and to Adama and warns them about Boomer so as to ensure his own safety. OH WAIT NO, what he does is fuck all. He tells no one. HOW DOES THIS MAKE ANY SENSE? HE THINKS THE CYLONS HAVE TRIED TO KILL HIM ONCE! HE WORRIES ONLY ABOUT SELF-PRESERVATION! But he's going to keep this one close to his chest because naturally nothing is safer than an undiscovered sleeper agent. Fuck you BSG writers, fuck you all. They don't even try to explain why he does this. Fans everywhere were falling over themselves to make excuses about this scene, it was sad. God, just remembering this scene makes me angry.

Also, the testing of the sample takes a couple of minutes. Note this because the writers are going to "forget" this as they try to recover from the premise spoiling fuck-up they have created.

Conclusion

Laura Roslin once again carries the episode with her sheer level of cold-hearted and calculating badassness. The scenes with Baltar and Boomer are actually pretty good with the conversation she can't see going on, it's just a shame that the writers are a bunch of incompetent dicks. Finally, the episode continues to play with the line between science and religion, but unfortunately they're going to decide at some point they need to answer all the questions. This is a classic mistake and they all need to go read the Author trilogy by Bernard Cornwell who walks a perfect line between whether magic is real or not and, unlike 99% of writers, doesn't fuck it all up at the end by trying to explain everything.

This is exactly why BSG remained interesting till the end even though the plot went nowhere. The feeling of wartime hardship was modeled on actual wars and felt very real, unlike Star Trek where many episodes feel more like sitcom in space to me.

There are a lot of ways in which BSG walked a more experimental path: the directorial style, especially of space shots, meshed greatly with the atmosphere, the use of music from various cultural influences meshed with the idea of the Twelve Colonies all having distinct cultures. And of course the deliberate mixing of future tech with current day or historic tech. When Adama has the same IKEA desk lamp as I do, does that make the series look stupid or all the more real?


(Though I have to mention that the throwback to old tech is also because the Galactica, an ancient relic of a spaceship, was the only ship not vulnerable to Cylon hacking. The rest of the fleet was all equipped with modern tech but they were quickly taken out by the Cylons)

Do you mean The Warlord Chronicles, (His take on Arthurian legends)?
In which case I agree wholeheartedly, it is also an excellent read regardless of you feelings about ambiguity

Lum's referring to

That's the one. I recall reading something where he said that Sharpe is his bread-and-butter, but The Warlord Chronicles are what he'd want to be remembered for.

Despite the fact that I am a massive Sharpe fan (eg: my username), I do think the Warlord Chronicles is Cornwell's best work and also, a truly excellent read by itself. For anyone who even marginally likes historical fiction or fantasy, it's really highly recommended.

Season 1 - Episode 9 "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down"

Dr Baltar's report! That must be about Boomer, right? Wrong.

Seriously, you must be shitting me. Verification takes hours? Yet only one episode before it took two minutes. I believe this is normally hand-waved away as there having potentially been an eleven hour gap between Boomer scenes in the previous episode. Right.

You see how the Cylon Detector already sucks? Rather than watching Adama closely and questioning his actions and never really being sure, we're going to get a test to sort it all out.

Oh God, Ellen Tigh, the worst character the series produces.

And the episode ends with some serious stupid. So apparently Baltar is going to pass everyone... why? I think Adama might hear that Baltar isn't spending any time in the lab, considering that nuke must be under pretty heavy guard. But let's assume he thinks he can get away with it there's still the issue of Ellen's test. "I'll never tell" he says in relation to her result. This is supposed to cover them against him not reporting the Boomer incident, but it still makes no fucking sense. If it's red he'd report it, his character's nature is such that he wouldn't be able to pick up the phone fast enough. Self-preservation and cowardice are his driving forces, and a known Cylon agent is nothing but a danger to him.

Conclusion

Ellen Tigh sucks. She's supposed to be manipulative, but unlike great manipulative characters (for example, Jim Profit) she's written in an incredibly clumsy way, or is supposed to be clumsy at manipulation. Either way, she's an annoying character and I think we were all secretly hoping she'd be airlocked ASAP. On the plus side, the Caprica stuff is great. I love the way that Boomer, freed of her need to get Helo to love her (or rather, now desperate to save him), switches immediately from damsel in distress to the real driver of the pair.