Battlestar Galactica 2004 Rewatch - Spoilers don't need to be blurred

Cafe Society
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Episode: Flesh and Bone

I haven’t been summarizing the episode because I assume people can look it up or watch it if they want.

This episode is a lot of philosophy. Roslyn has prophetic dreams. The captured cylon introduces monotheism. A bit of background on Starbuck. I will say that Roslyn seemed to see through Leoben’s BS pretty fast and realized what he was doing. I assume the episode title is about the cylon but not when he can do things humans can’t.

Philosophy in a show is good if it gives a payoff. Not all things need to be explained but they need to be there. I guess I will see if someone pulled the threads and made something good or just a tangled mess.

I want to know how much Helfer got any say in the various Six’s. In this episode, she’s playing both of them too similarly. The Caprica one needs to be less about sex appeal and more about the mission.

Speaking of the mission on Caprica, it makes no sense. Why would anyone think that Helo would just settle down? Why would he? He’s trying to find others. They need to let him find other survivors. Then see if Boomer can convince him to stay and have kids. I’m still in awe of the idea of finding someone else on a planet! Further, I thought radiation treatment was short lived? With as many nukes as we saw go off in the mini series, I’m pretty sure it should be about them leaving.

Baltar. Sigh. Several times, reactions by others waited until Six said something or moved. I know it continues and it’s going to keep annoying me. He created a test so that if he doesn’t like the result, he pounds the keyboard and it switches to the other result. I don’t understand that. Someone doesn’t understand technology. Baltar’s Six is jealous of Boomer, as is the Caprica one. Not sure what that does to the idea that Baltar’s is an angel.

I was fine with Starbuck being the best sniper. It’s possible. Why was she sent to interrogate the cylon? That made no sense. The cylon made no sense. He shows he can bust out of his restraints at any point. If he didn’t want to be spaced, he should have escaped easily, and at any time. I’m not sure why he let himself be spaced. Do we have a broken arrow situation here? Did they lose track of their nukes? There is ONE military ship. How long would it have taken to do an inventory of nukes? He gave them twelve hours! It’s storylines like this one that make it too much drama.

I think there are too many storylines in an episode. I don’t like getting seven or eight minutes of a story and then waiting. They can’t catch all plot holes but another script pass or series bible would have been nice. If they have a solid plot, it doesn’t need the best payoff for me to think a show is good. If I’m confused or don’t like some storylines, the payoff needs to be so good as to be impossible to do.

Thanks for the discussion!

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This, I fully agree with. It has a horrible synergy with my comment upthread that the cast is also too big.

And it’s deadly dangerous in a re-watch. I know that the last time I did, I absolutely hit the FF button for a huge number of sequences because the subplot was just pointless in the greater scheme of things, or that the characters totally didn’t interest me (sorry, Not-sorry Baltar, Tigh most of the time).

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I recently watched this series for the second time. I enjoyed watching Cally get angrier and angrier each time she showed up. She had a particularly rough apocalypse.

Something that puzzled me about ‘33’ is the lack of a second or third shift. How did the Galactica normally operate? Did it keep banker’s hours or something?

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Bugged me no end on this show. The pilots were the only people keeping the fleet safe. But they use them as marines. They use them as bodyguards. No way you risk your pilots like that.

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The ship was in the process of being decommissioned and turned into a museum when the Cylons attacked. They had probably downsized most of the crew by that point. This also explains some of the common complaints I heard about the crew occasionally being incompetent: They weren’t the best of the best, they were the ones left behind to close out the Galactica as a working military asset.

Hell, remember they had to start using the Vipers they had on display for the museum, because they didn’t have enough modern Vipers.

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They didn’t seem particularly understaffed during the rest of the show; they had enough marines on board they could spare one to stand outside Adama’s door if he forgot to close it when he left his quarters.

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By that time, they’d started recruiting for within the fleet. “Join the Marines, and Eat Every Day!”

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BSG was barely 20 years ago, but a lot about how TV shows are made has changed since then. If it were being produced today, it would probably be about 8 to 10 episodes per season and the various plotlines would be much tighter and more quickly developed.

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Thanks for all the replies!

In my case, it might make me drop off my rewatch. I’m sad about that because I remember being okay with two of the three endings. I had issues but was still entertained.

It varies from show to show and I agree with this in broad terms. I pin a lot of this on Moore. My wife has been happy with how he has done Outlander, one of her favorite book series, and it makes me wonder if he needed to find a series that aligns with his showrunning style?

It’s also tough to remove nostalgia from a rewatch. Did Bab5 have too many plots? I don’t know because I love it. Did TNG have too many people? Well, yes, but again nostalgia even if I questioned a lot when it was on. (Why did the weapons person just report on a helm reading? Well, turns out the writers would give the lines to the correct stations but at some point in the filming, someone would say, “Hey, Worf hasn’t said anything in a while, so give him a line.” Sigh.) I think Buffy/Angel/Firefly hold up well. Probably from the 80s backward, it’s nostalgia because I’m not sure how well shows hold up.

I know, right? I get that it’s main character syndrome but they did have other choices to do this particular mission.

My first thought is that this makes it more like the Orville! There is dialog to suggest that Adama kept some of the same crew he had for it, such as the Chief, so maybe not exactly the Orville. It’s like the Galactica is a custom car shop dealing in vintage ships. I found that a few US carriers are over forty years old. They do require a lot of maintenance. The quick search revealed the average age for US war ships is around nineteen years old.

I’m amazed that it took them five days before they apparently made a mistake. I also wondered about second and third shift. This seems to be main character syndrome again. Equally, though, there is no drama in this episode if they have enough shifts to cover it!

Thanks for the discussion!

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I’ve always wondered if they ever did the math on that. Because if this were deliberate, it’s a subtle hint that these people are not quite human, as we understand that term. They’d been awake and functioning under a high-stress environment for five days, and were only then starting to talk about using stimulants to keep going. Earth-normal humans would have been close to complete failure long before then.

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I haven’t been able to make myself rewatch TNG, because even when I was watching it live, I hated about 30-50% of the “B” side stories. If I ever have to listen about O’Brien’s marriage difficulties again I may well gouge out my eyes.

As for Bab5, I finished a rewatch within a year. It’s advantage, often due to the amazing makeup and costuming, is that the cast is very distinct, each character has it’s own arcs and changes, and the occasional all-in-one stories break up but don’t break down the overall story.

(my rewatch, for obvious reasons, is only seasons 1-4)

I agree that Firefly holds up, but again, it’s only one season, which spent a lot of itself establishing everything, including the characters, it’s always possible that if we’d had the rest it would have over-spent itself.

If I had to mention my nearly perfect (and it has plenty of flaws!) SciFi series of the general era, it’s Farscape. Much smaller cast, benefits from amazing costuming and makeup, and in the earlier seasons, nicely episodic with a general unifying story, as we follow John and he shares our knowledge of some of the tropes without it becoming tongue-in-cheek. But the later seasons tended to bog down in excess character drama, and sometimes the damn tropes got out of control (and don’t get me started on the twinning/clone arc!).

Hmmm. Maybe if Bab5 wasn’t a bit too heavy into the whole “chosen ones” and the messiah complex, despite the strength of all the supporting characters, it would be my “nearly perfect” example. I’ll have to reponder that.

Still, with Farscape, keeping the primary cast small meant I never wanted to skip an entire episode because it never brought up a single character I cared about like BSG (god I hated episodes centered back on Caprica).

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I know this is a bit of a digression but for me although I have re-watched the whole of TNG it really is just certain episodes that I like to watch. That is one series that you really do not have to have seen all previous episodes to enjoy.

And back to this one. I remember wanting to re-watch BSG almost as soon as finished binge watching it. I never was able to watch it when it originally aired though I had been interested in doing so. I did not make it through a complete re-watch at that time because I think it stopped being available on whatever streaming service I happened to have been using. And just like @vislor I just started re-watching it again, though this time on a nicer tv and usually wearing earbuds which lets me hear the nuance of the sound design.

Also, and I don’t know if everyone knows this but it is worth to watch until the very end of the credits. There is always a short cartoon with both producers where one dies and is different for every episode. I missed that the first few times I was watching because streaming services skip the credits and then go to the next episode, but now I make sure I try to watch them.

//i\\

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I now kind of want to see a character who explicitly doesn’t care about people because he’s so good at reading them — where his whole personality is built around him interacting with blandly predictable folks who tediously showcase obvious ‘tells.’

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So a more morally bankrupt Sherlock Holmes? :slight_smile:

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Gregory . . . House?

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Or any number of other “world weary” cantankerous detectives, or wise women who’ve lived long and seen it all.

And

To name just two.

Oh heck, both Mal and Inara from Firefly as mentioned upthread share these elements, although it depends on just how sociopathic (eyeballing you again Baltar!) as opposed to jaded you want your character.

And if you want to combine the great understanding of how people work with semi-supernatural intellect or just world-wise.

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When in the actual US Navy, at the age of 19, I once stayed awake for close to 70 hours straight (so less than 3 full days) with no other stimulant than caffeine*. I took meal breaks and a shower or two, but I was awake the entire time. By the end of it, I was borderline hallucinating and more or less non-functional as an asset to my warship. My Chief took me to the galley, got me a meal, made me take a shower, and then sent me to my bunk “until you wake up”. I slept for almost 18 hours. Worked for 4 hours, then slept again for over 12 hours. I actually got a letter of commendation out of it.

* We had several major mechanical issues in a row and I was a specialist in fixing them. Plus we still ran flight-ops from 6a-9p every day where I had my “day job” to do. I kept telling everybody I was fine until I started doing things like trying to tighten a bolt with a hammer and going to the flight deck with zero safety gear on.

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A far cry from its first run, when the advice was to not watch the credits because the ad for next week’s episode would invariably have spoilers in it. I recall one week where the commcercial for the second half of a two-parter completely gave away that Gina kills Admiral Cain.

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Back in 2019, I flew into Singapore, and home from Shanghai for a cruise.

I never sleep well on planes, so when flying to Singapore, due to some weirdness, I was mostly awake for probably 30 hours.

On the flight home, I started watching this WWII movie that sounded interesting. But it was weird - I was predicting what was about to happen almost perfectly, lines of dialogue and everything. Eventually I realized; I had watched the same movie on the first flight, but I had completely forgotten about it. That’s how wonky my brain was after just 30 hours.

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Episode - Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down

Sorry about the delay in my rewatch. I avoided this one because I remember not liking Saul’s wife. I still don’t.

This episode was a low point for me. I don’t always watch the recaps but because it has been a while, I watched this time. I find them interesting because they often show what the writer or editor thinks is important for the viewer to remember. In this one, they showed Leoben telling Roslyn that Adama was a cylon. This was a bad start to the episode.

In the episode where Leoben does that, she immediately sees it for the trick it was. It was a great character defining moment for Roslyn and showed she could read people and knew when someone was trying to sow dissent. This undid all of that to me. They were back to paranoia, spying, and suspicion.

I didn’t like any of the main or side stories in this episode. A few things that were interesting. Caprica Boomer apparently has stamina and keeps going. Helo can’t keep up. Admittedly, she’s probably not as worn out as he is as a base. I guess it’s a hint that she’s not human but equally, how do they miss that? They did bring back the glowing spine through her, which would seem to be easier to detect. Maybe she’s working against the others but so fast? I already don’t like that they don’t have basic science that we have today in terms of reproduction.

Baltar and Six are annoying as usual. I still feel for Tricia and what she has to do or what she represents in most episodes. Baltar’s actions around others should make them all paranoid about him.

Then the raider. WTF? Was it wounded or not? Why pretend? Dialog says it didn’t send a communication out. Assuming that’s true, why do a suicide run when it comes out of it? Why not jump back to give the fleet’s position? What the frack is the plan???

I’m watching it on Prime and found an extension to play Prime faster. Even watching this at 1.5x, it was not a good episode for me. Only four more episodes in the season.

One of the things that I don’t like is when writers have a lack of imagination and can’t work within the parameters of the world. This episode is all drama and no substance. Anyone can do the math of eleven hours per test and over forty four thousand souls to know that Baltar’s test is useless. Even giving him a team of ten working round the clock still means almost six years to run all the tests. I get some of it is set size but his lab looks like an old closet. I assume the guard is due to the nuclear device in there, so there are some good things.

The other thing I don’t like is when a show tries to hide something from the viewer. There are times to do that, good reveals that increase the tension. I know they didn’t have a plan and that makes this rewatch tough because they can’t tell us what they don’t know. If we are going to hear Six and the other caprica cylon talking, we should learn more about them, not hear them pine about Boomer. There should be a reason Ellen came back or was saved, since all of that was strange. Again, too many threads, and this complicated them.

Thanks for the discussion!