Battlestar Galactica thoughts and other life things

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was going to post this in the thread I started on my rewatch of BSG but didn’t want to crap on the show there. Plus, who knows if I will go back to it or not? I decided to share it anyway and hope it amuses.

On BSG:

Wow. My attempt to rewatch BSG died pretty fast and easily. I have been thinking about it and decided to share, so I hope it’s interesting. These are on me, not the show itself.

Reason - I needed something to occupy my time and thought this would do so. It did for a bit there and I’m happy that it worked for a while. We had lost one of our dogs and I wanted a distraction.

Time - I have watched many things in the past several months, even rewatched movies I have seen, so it’s not that I didn’t have time. The commitment to get through 63 more episodes seemed like a lot. As I type that and reread it, I’m not sure how much I’m fooling myself. I have the time but something happened that pushed me away from it.

Story - Part of it was remembering what was to come or remembering what does come and wondering if I found a plot hole. Baltar builds a cylon detector that says yes for Boomer. We know that is correct but does he when it switches it to no? (And by randomly pushing a bunch of buttons on his testing machine!) This is when Baltar was no longer a scientist and it was all drama. He didn’t question if it was right or wrong or try again against a control. Maybe that’s asking too much from any show.

Characters - This time around, I’m not invested in many of the characters. I don’t like Baltar. I don’t like the many versions of Six. Is the one Baltar sees a projection? From him? I’m not sure Baltar’s six was consistent, so again we are going to drama instead of a plan. It’s not that I don’t like Starbuck but she became the Mary Sue. They only way the writers could involve her as a main character was to give her the skill needed for that episode. I know that Roslyn doesn’t die from cancer, so all of that is drama. I don’t like Tigh or his wife, and that was the last episode I watched. Further, she IS a cylon, as revealed seasons later, so does Baltar’s test work or not?

Future episodes - I think thinking more and more about the story, I kept seeing the plot holes or things that made no sense to me. Do the cylons want humans dead? Yes because they wiped out the twelve colonies and tried to kill all humans. No, because they capture them and put them on a planet. Yes because they keep chasing them. NO. YES. Maybe?

I think this is where I diverged and it became more about what was happening with me than the show itself.

I think what happened for me was the show had already become Lost (Ha!) in itself. It’s drama of the week. It started out really good with world building and science. They need to find how the cylons keep finding them, although the human like ones are problems. They need water. They need supplies and other basics. The cylons had a simple plan to kill humans. Then we are lied to because the cylons are shown not to want to kill but to prove they are alive. Then maybe earth of old will have the answer. Somehow Baltar becomes a cult leader and is still on Galactica? (If I remember that correctly.) How is he not relegated to a civilian ship? Why do even care about him anymore? Why do the cylons even care about humans anymore? How can the humans work with the cylons, who destroyed their civilization? Any one or two of these might have been okay but as they pile up, it becomes harder and harder for me to believe in it anymore.

I don’t know if it is because it’s Ronald Moore running it (And I told my wife I was worried for her show Outlander when it was announced he was showrunner) and Trek didn’t do ongoing stories. Looking up Moore’s credits, he worked TNG, DS9, and Voyager, which I never finished Voyager and it was years before I saw all of DS9. I didn’t watch Roswell so don’t know how good that was. Carnivale was another show that started with some great things to draw me into it but soon became a mess that made no sense. It seems like Moore, and the early 2000s, were the last gasp of syndicated shows. Where Babylon 5 or even Buffy had stories across a season, or more, most shows didn’t do that or weren’t allowed. Execs didn’t want a tv show that had to be seen in a particular order. It seems a lot more shows do try and tell a story these days.

Again, this is on me and I do apologize for those who love the show. I got to a point where I wasn’t looking forward to watching the next episode, so I knew I had to stop. I don’t know if I will get back to it or not because other things have become a priority. I want to watch a quick movie or more coherent plot than what I had seen up to that point. Equally, if I don’t like something, I should stop instead of nit picking it to death, especially for those who enjoy it.

I think I’m also mad at myself and the money I have wasted over the years on DVDs/BR of TV shows and movies. I have all of Lost and won’t watch it, probably for many of the same reasons that I am talking about BSG. We tried to rewatch both Stargate SG-1 and Star Trek Enterprise and they didn’t hold up as well as what we had in our head. I also have all of those DVDs. I got True Blood on DVD, we didn’t have HBO then, but it’s not a show that we will watch again. (I would read the books again before I watch it.) I have some DVDs I like, such as TNG, Bab5, Adventures of Brisco County Jr, Forever Knight, Bond movies, X-Files, Doctor Who, Monty Python, and more. I see any of them that I can stream as a waste of money, even if there wasn’t any way to know that when I got them.

It has taken me a long time to realize that, sadly, I am paying the monthly fee to many streaming services in case I want to watch things again. It’s cheaper than buying all of the DVD boxed sets I have. The only reason I want to get some DVD sets is for BTS or blooper extras. If streaming had that, I think I could better justify paying for streaming services and not buying DVDs.

Thanks for the discussion on the other thread. Thanks for any who read this. I hope everyone is doing well. Take care!

2

It’s very difficult to write for a show to both have an overall arc for the series with a beginning, a middle and an end, but also allow for expansion of the series if it proves popular enough to accommodate extra seasons.

3

Fundamentally, the problem was that They Have a Plan… but none of the writers had any idea what it was. You just can’t do a good job on a story like that unless you have some idea right from the start where it’s going to end up.

4

If haven’t already, you might want to check out Moore’s For All Mankind on Apple TV+. Overall, it’s pretty good. No Cylons, no glowing red spines, but it does have FaceTimeing Apple Newtons if you can wrap your brain around that unlikely scenario.

5

What captivated me about BSG was the outstanding music. Bear McCreary’s score was magnificent.

6

This. Not only does winging it with a long-term premise like that effectively guarantee that the creators will write themselves into a corner where they can’t actually properly deliver on the premise, it angers fans when they figure out it was all a lie to begin with.

Funny thing is, it’s easy to avoid such a mistake: just don’t announce that there’s some big secret plan (or similar overarching plot point unless you’ve already written it out. The only reason fans cared that there was no secret plan was that they were told there was a secret plan. It was an unforced error, there was no need to announce “They Have a Plan”; I expect somebody just thought the line sounded cool and didn’t think about actually delivering on it at all.

7

We don’t have Apple TV. There are shows we would probably watch if we did but haven’t.

My wife says that Outlander has been done pretty well. Equally, she also trailed off on watching it and is a season or more behind. I don’t know if that’s the books or the adaptation.

I agree with all of that.

I understand that it’s tough to know how to handle the PR around a show. Do they explain what they had in mind? Or just do the show? I have heard showrunners say that they did what they wanted and hope fans like it. I have heard showrunners say that what they did was great and the people complaining don’t understand it. Seems like there can be some in between where they explain a bit of what they tried to do and what it took to pull it off.

As I type that, I know that I’m critical in my fandoms, although I’m just a lunkhead with an opinion and no real online presence. I didn’t like Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor but not because of Jodie herself but because of the terrible stories they did. Flux was bad, IMO. So was the backstory of the Doctor they retconned. I wonder if they wrote it as if a man was still the Doctor, thinking that the Doctor should be the same, and if so maybe shouldn’t have done that?

Back to BSG, there is a big difference between keeping characters in the dark and keeping viewers in the dark. Another place where there probably has to be a delicate balance. This is why a lot of the dialog with the cylons is clunky because when they are just talking among themselves, they still talk in riddles when they should be talking clearly about their goals. Of course, can’t do that when they don’t know what those are! How much better would they show have been if they had talked about the Final Five early on? Or used it to talk about their history and why the cylons think they way they do.

Thanks for the discussion!

8

I learned that lesson early enough, with Twin Peaks. I was so involved, trying to “solve” it, that it pissed me off that there was nothing to solve. It was just quirks for quirks’ sake. I’d love to rewatch it, just to enjoy the fun all over, but what would be the point? It won’t make any more sense the second time. I’ll never know if the gum I like will come back in style, or why her arms bend back, or why there was a fish in the percolator.

The X-files. They “had a plan”. And then they dumped it and started a new “plan”, completely forgetting the original plan. I had this great “solution” that made everything make sense, and CSM was the actual hero of the show. They should have hired me, because what we got was crap.

So I learned my lesson. NEVER AGAIN. I skipped them all. If anyone ever makes a show that has a convincing arc, well, that’s what DVDs are for.

And speaking of the OP, I;d like to rewatch OG BSG. But it ended so stupidly, too, that what’s the point? For every good “War of the Gods” Commander Cain, we got 3 Robbie Rist “Doctor Z is our only hope!” Gah.

9

A sci-fi show that I liked at first and really thought intriguing was The Event - Wikipedia (NBC, 2010-2011). The show’s starting premise was that a group of extraterrestrials who were apparently human but who had Old Testament-lifespans had been detained by the US government since World War Two; and now when a new administration decided to free them and announce their existence to the world, it opened multiple huge cans of worms. The problem was that the writers went overboard on conspiracies on top of conspiracies on top of still more conspiracies until the whole thing collapsed under its own weight and the show wasn’t renewed. There were about three or four excellent premises in there but they couldn’t settle on which to go with.

10

I just wanted to offer The Good Place as an example of a show that does have “a convincing arc” and satisfying payoffs to the things it introduces.

11

X-files told everything in s1e1. We talked about rewatching it, when we remembered that. It does mean we can skip mythology ones and just watch fun monster of the week ones.

“Y’all from the gummint?”

Thanks for the discussion!

12

It’s pretty clear that the whole “Final Five” thing came about because they’d written themselves into a corner - they’d established that there were twelve models, but in the scenes of the Cylons living in Caprica City or in the occupation of New Caprica, they only showed the same seven models that had already been revealed to the audience. So where are the other five? “Oh, umm, uhhh… they’re a SECRET!”

And then they realized they’d stuck themselves with the name “Final Five” too late to change it when the backstory they ultimately came up with meant that they ought to have been called the First Five instead.

13

Babylon 5 is a series with a plan. Though the panned ending had to be moved to the end of 4th season instead of the 5th (renewal was not assured). Thus the 5th season suffered.

Brian

14

I agree. It wasn’t perfect of course, in no small part because of such external issues. But it didn’t run into the issue of the creators writing themselves into a corner because they didn’t bother coming up with the show’s plot arc beforehand and just tried to wing it.

15

I felt the same sort of thing about “The Pretender,” just quirks for quirks’ sake.

16

If you haven’t seen Fringe, please do. It’s the same basic concept as X-Files, except for two differences: first of all, it was better; and second of all, they actually had a plan. Well - sort of. While the first three seasons were structurally perfect, I have a feeling that the fourth season may have come by surprise, and so was a bit disjointed; the fifth season was definitely unplanned, so they went completely bonkers with a storyline that has to be seen to be believed. But all in all, it’s a case of X-Files done right.

17

I really wonder why folks in charge of shows even try for these season-long arcs? It almost always turns to shit.

Just make each episode freestanding. That was plenty good for TV the last 70 years. Why not the last 10?

And yes, this curmudgeon is wearing his belt-onion. Why do you ask? :wink:

18

I think that a lot of it sprung from Lost – it certainly wasn’t the first U.S. dramatic series to incorporate season-long (if not series-long) story arcs, but when it was a huge hit in 2004, it seemed like it spawned a ton of other dramas which tried to do similar things.

19

Said another way, if you can pull it off, you’ll profit an extra 10-20%. But since 95% of available talent can’t pull it off, you’re simply betting on a losing horse and thereby blow up your own series.

The only thing dumber than gamblers are show-managers.

20

Show-managers are like a horse trainer who because his horse is winning decides that it’s okay to switch the jockey with someone who is 20 pounds heavier and inexperienced with horses.