I seem to recall Adama and Tigh did float that kind of idea, which I remember as “next time let’s double-jump and see if they still follow us.” Before they could work on the idea, Olympic Carrier missed the jump…
Didn’t they have an idea for the fleet to split up, jump in a bunch of different directions, then jump again to a pre-arranged rendezvous point? But like you say, the Olympic Carrier went missing first.
Gee I don’t know: maybe because it wasn’t a stationary museum? Try as you might you are not going to get around the fact that within minutes of a suprise attack from an enemy that hadn’t been heard of for forty years, the BG was on full alert and a fighting ship able to fight a respectable running retreat against a superior enemy. You think a stationary museum could do that? You’re making stuff up.
Also, I know about show don’t tell. The corridors of the ship were packed with people going everywhere. There wasn’t a dusty corridor or empty bunk to be seen. There wasn’t so much as an oblique reference to short handedness. Your whole case is based around the assumption that a warship loses much of its crew before it is decommissioned.
It’s a been awhile, but I thought the Galactica got filled up when they recruited staff and fighter pilots in training from other ships. I remember it being pretty clear that the ship had been pretty empty (though not derelict) and from the start you knew they were undermanned.
I watched the miniseries on Sunday and ‘33’ on Monday. You’re misremembering.
Okie dokies. But I clearly remember the feeling of an understaffed, short handed ship. It may not have been explicit, but to me it was clearly apparent.
You remembering an episode that happens about two episodes after 33.
Yeah, but it totally doesn’t count unless there’s an explicit statement by a senior officer as well as some blatant exposition between a couple crewmen for no reason other than to inform viewers who need to be spoon fed.
Anything else is just lazy writing.
-Joe
It’s been a long time since I watched the mini or season one. At the time, I was active on message boards and Ron Moore had his blogs and answered fan questions when he could. I’ve always known at least half the crew wasn’t aboard when the Cylons attacked, but I could have gotten than off-screen. Much of the crew had already been transferred to other ships or they were on shore leave.
The big deal at the time is that this is a fairly lax crew, and far from the best of the best, like you get in Star Trek. Galactica wasn’t a shiny new flagship on which only the best could hope to be assigned.
Starbuck of course was the best at everything, but that also included drinking and getting thrown in the brig.
Everyone was flawed, intentionally.
I’m not immune to the idea that I might be wrong, but when I see that others have to exaggerate and misrepresent to attempt to make headway against what I’m saying, I tend to think I’m on track. So thanks for that.
Okay, so I went and sought out a transcript for this episode. And sure enough, maybe a quarter of the way through the episode:
Tigh: 12 more cases of nervous exhaustion, that makes 61.
Adama: Have the doc start pumping 'em up with stimulants. Get 'em back on the line. Pilots too. one out of every three, every other cycle.
Tight: That’s gonna come back and bite us in the ass.
Adama: Yeah, well, we have too much work and not enough people to do it.
well, you are entited to believe whatever you want, even if it’s wrong. The fact that the ship was being mothballed and one launch bay was already converted to a museum and a whole bunch of other clues make it pretty clear the Galactica is not operating at full complement.
I don’t give a shit about that level of minutiae. All you need to know is the Galactica was short staffed until they could bring on new recruits from the pool of 45000 civilians tagging along.
Sure but there is short staffed and too much work, and then there is forcing two individuals to work 100+ hours without rostering them off such that they are becoming patently brain dead when they can between them (a) kill everyone on board with a miscalculation and (b) leave an entire ship behind with a miscommunication. In 5000 people they couldn’t find two people to replace them. Two people. And don’t tell me that these were the only two on board who could have done the job: I don’t buy it and even if I did, after the first fifty jumps they could have started giving a freakin’ monkey training at it and given the monkey fifty practice runs before putting them on duty. Out of 5000 people there was no one else smart enough to replace these two whose duties were less important?
Yanno, as I’ve said, I like what I have seen so far of the series. All I complained about were some annoying niggles. This debate isn’t dragging out because I really care that much about the niggles. It’s because some of you are hell bent on denying the niggles exist. While I’m simultaneously getting a lecture on how niggles are to be expected.
Seriously man, I gave you the words you were looking for and you still reject it? Maybe the people who who could replace them ALSO had other jobs to do? Gaeta and Dualla were basically focused entire on doing the FTL calcs and getting them out to the other ships. And a normal day, they would have other tasks to do.
You are neglecting the size of Adama’s testicles.
Nah, he’s not going to admit being wrong. Note that he blew right by my suggestion that we don’t see the other nav and comms officers because the story is not about those guys, it’s about Gaeta and Dee, the characters we actually care about. So of course the story occurs when they’re on duty, and not when red-shirt-comms-officer is.
But no one told us that in a line of dialogue, so it can’t possibly be true. If we don’t see the red-shirt, he can’t possibly exist. A tightly focused story and running times be damned, we should totally bring the pacing to a sudden halt while Adama and Tigh explain to each other why Gaeta and Dee happen to be on-duty and exhausted right then. Because, you know, they’d totally stop in the middle of a crisis to explain that to each other.
And Gaeta and Dee couldn’t be exhausted from being in fight-or-flight mode for 5 days straight! They’d go off-duty and sleep like a baby!
Oh, and it still wasn’t a skeleton crew. That line of dialogue means nothing!
I’d better stop, I’m giving myself hysterics. 
Anyway, the audience is capable of filling in their own blanks (and in the commentary, Ron Moore was very explicit in wanting to treat the audience like they could figure shit out on their own); and a 42-minute story doesn’t need to get bogged down in an extra 30 minutes of backstory, minutiae, and exposition, when really we just want to get on with the story.
Dude, they lost. Quickly. And thoroughly.
But at no point do they say that they’re short crew members! BAD WRITING!!!
No powerpoint explaining it either. Really bad writing.
-Joe
Keep watching the show, by all means, but please, for the love of God, don’t post threads about future episodes.
I mean, you did figure out the surprise to ‘The Crying Game’ right? After all, it was never actually STATED OUT LOUD that the girl was a guy.
No it is stated that Gaeta and Dualla had been working 100+ hours. They had time for that line. They just didn’t have time for dialog that would, yanno, make the ep make sense.
If they took a pill they would. I’ve never been through what those guys are supposed to go through but I have worked on crises before. For the first 24 hours you just go like a train with no thought as to how you are going to keep manning the crisis. Then you start to realise it’s going to go on for a while and you plan your manning. You figure out how you are going to relieve your absolutely key guys. Adama stuffed up if he didn’t pull Gaeta and Dualla off duty and make them take a pill and I don’t thing the story hangs together properly if he didn’t know this.
This comment in context is beyond stupid. Did you even think about what you were responding to before you blurted? You say the BG was a stationary museum. Within minutes of hearing they were under attack from an enemy they hadn’t heard of for forty years they were on full battle alert, and then fighting a retreat. By merely restocking with ammo they were at a point Adama considered taking on several Cylon capital ships. You think a “stationary museum” can do that? Really?
You ain’t gettin’ it. Re-read. You think that there weren’t two people out of 5000 who could have replaced Gaeta and Dualla because they all had jobs more important than Gaeta and Dualla’s work, the stuffing up of which could have caused (respectively) the whole fleet and entire ships to be lost. Really?
I am now convinced that you haven’t actually watched BSG.