Now we know what the Cylons’ plan was: upvoting the show.
Which, presumably was part of the reason the Galactica was such a relic - the prior generations had been “good enough” for the cylons of the era 50 years prior to the start of the story. The modern battlestars were much more integrated and who knows how competitive they’d have been if they hadn’t been corrupted.
It was being purposed for a museum ship for a reason!
(yes, yes, like our WW2 battleships, it was modernized repeatedly over the duration of it’s service life, but no it wouldn’t have been comparable to newer build ships in terms of tech and integration)
IMO, the only episodes of the original you need to watch are the pilot, the two-parters, the double-length episode, and the finale, and if you want you can throw in “The Return of Starbuck” from Galactica 1980.
The stand-alone episodes are mostly just ripoffs of popular movies of the time (The Magnificent Seven IIIIIN SPAAAACE! The Towering Inferno IIIIN SPAAAACE! Shane IIIIN SPAAAACE!) and don’t really add to the ongoing story, and you’ll get sick of the stock footage.
(One of the two-parters, The Gun on Ice Planet Zero, is a mishmash of three or four WWII movies, but I’ll count that as one of the good ones.)
Mostly agree, there are a few of the singletons that do have some worthwhile bits added to the ongoing story (The Long Patrol) but if I had to use a rule of thumb, yours is the most correct.
By your command.
-snigger-
Back to the point of the thread though, while I watched the whole 2004 BSG series, the only pieces I re-watch is the mini-series. It’s enough for me. The rest is just a bit too much, although there are LOTS of individually wonderful stories in there. But if I’m going to rewatch a scifi series, it’ll be B5 or Farscape.
One of the problems with BSG 2004 is that the cast is too large IMHO. As a viewer, I generally get involved/connected with say 2-3 characters but with a cast this size, they can easily be lost in the crowd, leaving me wanting to move on to the next segment that might capture me again. This is a personal judgement mind you, and some love a huge cast of characters to watch, but I do think it was a semi-common concern.
Episode: Water
I knew this was coming that they were worrying about supplies. Nice touch, as many mentioned.
Boomer ends up being the saboteur. Duh. When she’s doing the sweep, the screen clearly shows water contact. If she wasn’t seeing it that way, it would be nice to have shot it differently. Then she was ready to blow herself up instead of report on water, which was lucky she got the planet with water. It all makes no sense unless we find out later what her orders were and what she is doing now. Is she overcoming them? Did she not want to self terminate?
In searching for water, they talk about telescopes looking at systems and they have reached the limit. When asked what to do, the answer is “jump to another sector and start the search again.” Not sure how big a sector is but I assume that’s the range of a jump.
I’m annoyed that Baltar is good at poker, because, he’s smart? That’s not how gambling works! He doesn’t have the personality to be good at reading people because he doesn’t care about them.
I still like it and the drama. I’m seeing where I would want more for reasons other than drama. What is the character’s motivations? What is the plan? I know, they don’t have one, so it will be interesting to see if they cobble one together.
Thanks for the discussion!
First go-around, the mini-series was good enough to get me on board with the series. They did write themselves into some corners, though. Between the glowing red spine and the bad interaction with the radiation around Ragnar station, it should have been pretty easy to tell Cylon form human. I understand why these were abandoned in the series in order to up the level of paranoia, so I generally just let it go.
I have had a crush on Mary McDonnell since at least “Dancing With Wolves.” She’s got this slightly flirty air about her sometimes, and I love the way she employs it as President to charm people onto her side when necessary. It’s particularly noticeable when Lee tells her he is Captain Adama, and she replies that Captain Apollo has a nicer sound to it. You can see him succumb to her charm right there. I don’t blame him at all. 
I love Edward James Olmos in this role. He’s got such a great mix of paternal affection for his crew, somewhat world-weary I’m-too-old-for-this mannerisms, but real steel underneath. One of my favorite fictional captains ever.
Actually, for the most part, I thought the casting was excellent, particularly since most of the cast was relative unknowns to American audiences.
I think “33” is one of my top 5 hours of television ever. What a way to just throw the viewers right into the fatigue, and the despair, and the paranoia, and the moral grey areas. It’s a great ride.
I’m sure we’ll get into it later, but it is such a product of the aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror. For me, more than any other television show that I saw, the writers really seemed to wrestle with the moral ambiguities of that time. Occasionally they showed their cards and you could see a definite point of view, but for the most part they took a fictional terrorist event (albeit one with far worse consequences than 9/11) and examined all the different ways we deal with grief and trauma and patriotism and bigotry and faith in institutions when they let us down, and so much more.
I’m a big fan in case you couldn’t tell. 
The guy regularly scored with lots of women, he had to have some kind of game when it came to reading people, and knowing what they wanted. Just because he’s a jerk, doesn’t mean he isn’t perceptive.
My favorite part was the episode on New Caprica, in which they made you root for the suicide bombers, at a time when suicide bombings were an actual, real-world problem. Kind of made you understand why someone would go to that extreme.
I’m glad you love BSG! I can’t say it’s my favorite but I do enjoy it. This episode does throw us into the action, fatigue, and despair. I’m just greedy and want more! More clues, more dialog to explain things, more setup and foreshadowing.
I would argue that women were attracted to his power, his contacts, or wanted him to work for them rather than he could read people. It’s not out of the question, though. In that regard, reading people for poker is more than physical tells. It’s a skill set. This merely goes back to making the genius smart at everything, which annoys me.
I want to explain a bit more why this annoys me. This is early in the show and they are establishing characters. We are shown why Starbuck is a great pilot with how she saved her and Apollo. She’s not a lone wolf; she follows orders. She flies in formation with her squad. We are shown how good she is as a pilot in combat when it comes to dogfights. She also disrespects those she considers idiots. In the off time, when we see the pilots/military playing poker, Starbuck is shown as the one who wins the most.
Is it possible that Baltar could win? Of course! It’s still gambling. What bothers me is that we don’t get enough to know if he’s good or lucky. Equally, to be fair, we don’t get enough of the pilots playing to know how good they are! Starbuck could be the best of the pilots but if the pilots aren’t good, that doesn’t mean as much!
I apologize for this. I got into poker after the Moneymaker win, watched hundreds of hours of poker, if not thousands, hosted a home game for a year, and went to home games. I know just enough to know that I don’t know a lot and certainly couldn’t be a professional poker player.
Full Colors seems to be the equivalent of a straight flush and those don’t come up often, so that certainly bothers me. It did bother me when Starbuck won with it.
Every scene in a forty minute show should show us something about the characters. It’s why I get so nit picky on what they could have shown and what they did show. The scene I talked about in Water with Boomer is an example. I have no idea what was happening with her when she and Crashdown are looking for water and her screen comes up with a positive reading. There are no clues from the filming of it. That’s what is going to wear on me.
Looking at what we have seen about Baltar, then, I would argue his characterization is spotty and inconsistent. He’s called a genius but I’m not sure they have shown us that. I would argue at best his genius is like Steve Jobs. He’s a great front man but he doesn’t do the work. In the mini series, Six is the one who did a lot of the coding of the defense grid according to the dialog. He has confidence before the near genocide and from that point forward, he’s a sniveling whiner who has excuse after excuse. Wow. I just talked myself into really hating him. He needs to be spaced. 
I’m asking for a lot from the show, I know. Shows can’t do what I want them to do! It’s something I enjoy and so I have high standards, especially in genres I love.
It will be interesting in my rewatch to look for these points. Thanks!
Thanks for the discussion!
A point that was brought up about Baltar, that may tie into this debate, AND @vislor’s concern about his characterization may be found during a partial throw-away sequence regarding his early life.
First, major note, only a fool would consider Baltar a trustworthy storyteller, and he was deliberately drying to build empathy here, so by NO means should this be taken as anything more than another fan theory.
But it’s during the sequence where he talked about his early life, and how at the age of 10 he found his prospects controlled by preconceptions his accent gave, and trained himself to speak the Caprican dialect instead. That means (again IF he’s honest) he was adept at reading people from a very young age, smart enough to figure out consequences, and driven enough to change. Those sorts of reading skills could be good helps in poker, but certainly we would need to know a lot more. Heck, if that background is true, maybe he was a cardshark long before he was a scientist.
As for his actual intellect… I’m mostly in @vislor’s camp - I do think he was smart, but better at the endless self promotion, more similar to Elon Musk than Steve Jobs as it were. And like Musk, he probably succeeded beyond his actual abilities to the point where he believed his own propaganda, leading him to make promises he couldn’t deliver on, and leaving him at the mercy of 6.
So, if I read BSG from a 2024 perspective, I’d cast Baltar as a fallen Musk - stripped of his actual money and power, but with a huge number of fans in desperate circumstances STILL believing the hype, and asking much of him. Very little of it he’s capable of delivering.
FTR though, Steve Jobs would have been a better comparison in 2004+ absolutely.
He did make a Cylon detector, right? I mean that plot point fades quickly, but it did work. He was aware of Boomer’s cylon-status.
He may have. But - given 6s ability to mess with Baltar emotionally and visually, I don’t trust anything in Baltar’s vision to be credible as accurate in the rest of the universe.
It would suit her goals just fine either way for him to know it works, and be at risk, or to make him see the truth and deny it even if his device didn’t work.
Those are interesting observations, thanks! I suppose if Baltar manages to make something, that puts him ahead of Jobs. I think later he does have a cult, so that also works for comparing to Musk. Again, though, Musk and Jobs never thought they were doing anything wrong, strongly believed in themselves, and had a huge (public) ego. At the moment, Baltar isn’t that. I will say it’s tough to judge that when 6 is there but he does jump and startle for no reason, which doesn’t help.
Next episode: Bastille Day
I know they call themselves humans and have a myth of Earth. Now they have Bastille Day?
Overall, great episode. Good tension, good character development.
“I have my flaws, too.”
“The difference is that mine are personal, yours are professional.”
Tigh is not wrong. Twenty years ago, I was on Starbuck’s side. Now? I’m on his in this instance.
I think Adama’s “pick a side” thing was a bit heavy handed. Or this is a good point for someone to point out the sides to me because I’m with Apollo on this all the way. There is one side, humanity. Roslin (Yes, Mary McDonnell is awesome!) is finishing Adar’s term. They don’t have a monarchy, tyranny, or autocracy, so that’s how it should be.
I can still quibble but this was a great episode.
Thanks for the discussion!
I’m not there yet so this may change. I think he does but IIRC when he tests Boomer and it comes back positive, he doesn’t think it works. That’s my vague recollection of it.
Thanks for the discussion!
No one has ever been more unjustifiably denied an Emmy than Mary McDonnell for “Battlestar Galactica.” She was the best actor in the show and not by a slim margin. Just a tremendous performance - one of the best I have ever seen in any television program. One hundred percent the equal of Cranston in “Breaking Bad.”
One thing that always tickled me about the series, is the in-universe closing, or “Amen” of the pantheists.
“So say we all.”
It’s nice, it’s a fine choice to have a similar but non-Earth closing and oath, which serves to differentiate the humans of BSG.
But it’s so (and almost certainly deliberately) ironic! Because I can’t think of many other series where the cast speaks it, while it being so far from the truth. Even the theoretical closest of friends, allies and family have wildly divergent priorities and goals, despite always paying lip service to unity on the surface.
Tickles me every time.
Actually, one of the little things I love about the clashes between Adama and Roslin is how the shades of it return when the Pegasus arrives on the scene. But that’s a story for another day.
I’m going to make the case for Michael Hogan as Saul Tigh, although it’s not as evident in the early episodes as it will become. He did some great work in the first half of Season 2, but there’s one line reading in Season 3 that makes me tear up every time. If Hogan can make me feel that much sympathy for Saul Frakking Tigh, then he deserves all the accolades that can be thrown at him. He absolutely should have been nominated for the Emmys at least twice.
There’s so much to talk about regarding the politics of the fleet. How do you maintain a civilization with a functioning government in extremis like they are? Roslin is absolutely correct to assert her authority as President. Adama is absolutely correct to think that someone who was never realistically going to be President might not be the best person to lead during such an emergency.
I have always thought that the “correct” course of action would have been for Roslin to declare martial law (or whatever the equivalent is) until such a time as the military emergency was over. That would have legitimized Adama’s leadership while at least maintaining the illusion that there was still civilian control over the military. OTOH, I can understand why in the early stages Roslin would not trust that Adama would relinquish such power when the time came, or even use that power wisely and to the benefit of all.
Someone finally voices what I was always thinking later in the series (Season 2, I think), that if Roslin is not the President (in other words, if they’ve abandoned their form of government), then Adama isn’t a Commander in the fleet, and the people under him aren’t soldiers bound to obey his orders. I suppose he could have declared himself a military dictator (he does, after all, have all the guns), but that seems antithetical to Adama’s world view, and there was dissension enough in the fleet as things stood.
Society is messy, isn’t it?
Boomer at this point doesn’t know she’s a Cylon, but she realizes she probably had something to do with sabotaging the water supply, and between that and her PTSD from fleeing Caprica and leaving Helo to die she’s starting to doubt herself. This is going to be a major theme for her character going forward.
In contrast, the other Boomer you’re seeing, the one who’s reunited with Helo on Caprica, knows what she is and has a very specific agenda for Helo that’s going to play out over the course of the season.
Not literally. IIRC, though, this is the first episode that establishes that the religion of the Twelve Colonies is based around the classical Greek gods, which is a unique aspect of the remake and a big change from the vaguely Mormon / Erich von Daniken-inspired mythology of the original. (There’s a bit in the miniseries where Tigh exclaims “Jesus!”, which was an ad lib on Michael Hogan’s part, and they never mention it again, so Christianity definitely doesn’t exist in Colonial society.) One of the overarching themes of the series is eternal recurrence - “all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again”, and it’s going to take until the very end of the series for all of it to make sense, but this isn’t the only time you’ll see aspects of Earth culture pop up in a society that has no connection to Earth.