Battlestar Galactica 3.8 - "Hero" (spoilers)

Cafe Society
101

[QUOTE=Lightray]
This bobble in Adama’s fleet record is more on the scale of the fiddly nitpicks in continuity of these two, than the wholesale ignoring of continuity that Star Trek has been known for.
[/QUOTE]
Just as a for instance, in the mini-series we must assume Cylons have been infiltrating the Colonies for at least several years. Adama says a couple episodes ago “I don’t do regret.” Or something like that. Then, this episode he breaks down crying because why? He does do regret? And it occurs to no one the Cylons must have been planning this invasion for at least several years before Adama snuck over the Armistice line?

See, in each and every episode of BSG we can expect excellent performances from the actors. I assume this is what you mean when you (and ElvisL1ves) say it’s character driven. IMO, we can’t always expect the actor to remain true to his or her character in relation to every other episode.

In this very thread some people have mentioned they’re happy the characters seem to have gone back to their old selves.

Ron Moore says it himself. “I’m just trying to tell a good story.” But what he does with the continuity, the technology and the characters in the over-arching scheme of things takes a back seat to what makes a “good story” this week.

This week, it takes Cylon Basestars exactly 33 minutes to find and attack the fleet. This week, we need water. This week, we need Tyllium fuel. This week, everyone in the fleet buys whatever they need off the black market. This week, let’s explore what we’d do with a biological weapon.

I don’t understand your point. This show is all about the characters and the scifi backdrop is just that. It’s characters doing their thing and it’s only the background sets that change from show to show. How is it different from other scifi shows?

In some ways I’d say this show isn’t even all that character driven compared to someone like Joss Whedon. He’d at least have made me understand more completely why Apollo got fat then got un-fat.

102

Great post levdrakon. I just have one minor nitpick:

[QUOTE=levdrakon]
Adama says a couple episodes ago “I don’t do regret.” Or something like that. Then, this episode he breaks down crying because why? He does do regret?
[/QUOTE]

Seems to me to be perfectly in character, and still preserves continuity. Anyone who says they have no regrets is lying - and if you have a whopper that you’re not telling anyone, you’re more likely to say you have no regrets.

Personally, I’m just glad they’ve started doing episodes about the Old Man again. (Fun as it was, I was starting to get tired of “The Baltar and Friends Show”.) Seems to me that the miniseries and most of the first two seasons were about Adama Sr, and how things related to him. This little piece of tension between Adama and Roslyn - his wanting to retire, and her determination to stay the course - should be useful to the scriptwriters to keep their relationship interesting.

103

[QUOTE=levdrakon]
I don’t understand your point. This show is all about the characters and the scifi backdrop is just that. It’s characters doing their thing and it’s only the background sets that change from show to show. How is it different from other scifi shows?

In some ways I’d say this show isn’t even all that character driven compared to someone like Joss Whedon. He’d at least have made me understand more completely why Apollo got fat then got un-fat.
[/QUOTE]

Well, since I’d have a hard time calling Whedon’s Buffy or Angel series character-based and consistent, we might have too differentiated of perspectives, here. But.

Star Trek was not about how the characters reacted to their situation. It was about the situation each week in futureworld. The characters were bent and altered and crammed into whatever the plot required. Look at Worf in TNG: his character is supposed to be the bad-ass warrior – yet he gets owned, time and time again to show how bad-ass the bad guy is.

Contrast to BSG: we’ve seen characters being bad-ass. They occasionally fail, but we’ve seen why they’re to be considered bad-ass. Mind you, I was one of those people expressing relief at the characters reverting to their characterization – there’ve been some BSG episodes where the characterization has been all over the place. But those have been far in the minority; not so in Star Trek.

Babylon 5 and Farscape also did better on characterization than poor Star Trek. Farscape was extremely character-driven – episodes weren’t “oh noes! the warp core is going to breech, what technobabble will we have Data say to fix it this week?” but were instead “oh noes! Moya has caught space herpes again – but who cares, cause Crichton and Scorpy are going at it with that as the backdrop.”

Another thing that character-driven sci-fi shows seem to have in common is that the characters change from what they go through in the episodes. Star Trek was particularly bad at resetting everything to the status quo by the end of the episode (at least until DS9; then Voyager returned to that status quo). Babylon 5, Farscape, and BSG allow things – and characters – to change.

I think what is different about character-first over story-first is that, at the end of the episode, you’ve had changes occur that would have happened if the same people had been plopped down on some different backdrop, sci-fi or not. Most of the time in Star Trek, that’s not the case; the episode is about the weird premise required for the story. In the better BSG episodes, the story would have occurred even without the weird premise.

… and I’m still not sure if I’m explaining myself clearly here.