Cally saying “bullshit,” for one thing.
Ooh, there’s extra footage on the DVDs? I might have to rent those. I’ll buy them someday, but can’t afford it at the moment.
I’m totally stoked for Season 3. I didn’t start watching until the middle of Season 2, and had a lot of catching up to do. I’ve finally seen everything that was broadcast, so I’m jonesing for more.
Is it just me, or are these webisodes, just a little overly predictable and somewhat poorly written?
I’m actually hoping they haven’t screwed the pooch, because they have been riding high, generally speaking, for these first two seasons, with a great deal of quality – but these things make me apprehensive about S3 more than excited.
Anyone else feeling this?
Well, the webisodes are never going to be up to the standards of the actual show. They’ll be much, much lower budget (notice how they’ve never had any CGI toasters), use second-tier characters for the most part, and probably don’t get their best writers or crew. Nature of the beast.
There’s been some information on the official scifi.com boards about a behind-the-scenes dispute that has, apparently, been affecting the quality of the webisodes. The way certain insiders have described it, SciFi’s parent company, NBC Universal, wants to treat the webisodes as marketing material rather than actual installments of the show, which would allow them under the contract to pay the talent differently. And by differently, I mean “less.” In response, the story goes, several of the creative people involved, including the writers, have stopped working on the webisodes, leaving the partially-finished material in the hands of the network to polish (loop, edit, etc). It’s been suggested on those boards that certain network decisions have made a noticeable negative impact on the quality of the webisodes as aired. (“Aired”? You know what I mean.)
For example, in the webisode where the Cylons shot up the temple tent, there’s a moment at the beginning when they first show up (off camera, outside the tent) and we hear somebody yell “infidel.” This is obviously an on-the-nose Iraq parallel, rather more blatant than the show usually plays; and it turns out it was the network’s doing, in post-production, rather than something that was written or shot (or recorded) by the original team.
That’s just one example of how even after a webisode has been written and shot, after you’d think the show is basically done, further work on editing, scoring, and looping is necessary to tighten up the show and get it where it needs to be. And if that work is sub-par, the result will be sub-par. The “infidel” line is one of the few specific examples where a network choice is known for certain, and is an obviously questionable decision that suggests the presence of others.
If there’s really something to this, then I expect we’ll hear more about it in coming months, as rumor solidifies into fact. Presuming it is that bad, if the disagreement is resolved in favor of the creatives, we may see better-polished versions of the webisodes on the eventual DVD.
I don’t know for sure, but it does make some sense.
I did think webisode 6 was pretty good. For a 3 minute scene, I thought it was well written & acted. Best so far.
I can’t compare the quality of the webisodes to what may happen in the actual broadcast show though. If you’re worried about that, you shouldn’t be. Worry about how the frack they’re going to get Starbuck back into a viper with the current storyline.
I’ve been watching BSG via Netflix. Unfortunately Season 2.5 just came out and I have a “long wait” before I can watch. I don’t know if I’ll be done in time for season 3. Frak!
Yeah, just saw the ads (every 15 minutes) on Space bouncebouncebounce
Usually we have to wait until January.
- Sooner or later, the show has to get back into space; they can’t be stuck on New Caprica indefinitely. So here’s how I would write it:
In a way, having the Cylons show up was to the humans’ advantage. Let’s face it: a rag-tag fleet of whatever people, supplies and equipment just happened to be off planet when the colonies were nuked would have practically no chance of long-term survival in space; they don’t even have the agro-ship!. They’ve gotten by this far on (presumably) some cargo vessels that happened to be carrying food, a single mobile tylium refinery, and what weapons and ammo were available at Ragnarok Station. Sooner or later they would have run out of food, medicine and irreplacable machinery. The decision to settle New Caprica was partly based on the stark realization that they couldn’t hope to go much further.
Enter the Cylons. If nothing else, the Cylons at least are feeding the humans. The organic Cylons have to get their own food from somewhere; maybe they grow it in biodomes or clone it in tanks, or something. For all practical purposes, the only realistic source of food, medicine, equipment and raw materials are the Cylons themselves.
So maybe Adama is going to plunder the Cylons for all the things needed to make the fleet self-sufficient for a “forty years in the wilderness” journey across the galaxy. As to actually getting the humans off-planet, I would love to see Adama somehow do a “let my people go” Moses thing, where for some reason the Cylons temporarily have to acquiesce, only to warn Adama that the humans have now “violated their probation”.
- I suspect we’re going to see some of Thrace’s demons revealed as the Cylons hold her in some sort of mental ward.
I got the 2.5 DVDs. Haven’t gone through all the bonus stuff yet, but I did watch the extended Pegasus ep. They didn’t skimp on adding material, and I had to keep reminding myself at times I hadn’t just stumbled across an entirely new episode. Cally saying “bullshit” was fun. It was like an easter egg. Oh no. She did not just say what I think she just said!
Count me in as reticent about the start of season three though. I really don’t like the WWII prison camp resistance story-line. I plan on being kinda bored & irritated with it the first few eps until they (hopefully) get back into space.
I don’t like Starbuck’s long hair. Don’t like Tyrol’s beard. I’m still waiting for Baltar the genius to do something genius-y. There’s too much emphasis on religion & faith for my tastes. Although, I guess I can’t blame them for getting religious when they’ve lost 20 billion people and pretty much everything else taken from them.
One of the things I and most others liked about seasons one & two was the darker, more serious feel of the show. But it just gets darker, gloomier, more desperate, hopeless & depressing all the time. I’m not sure how many more seasons of that I can stay with. At some point Moore’s got to give the characters a break, or I’m going to have to take a break.
I’m not sure the skin-jobs have to eat. I got the impression that they were not feeding the Number 6 prisoner (Pegasix) on Pegasus. Also, I thought the planet was able to support human life. That should mean that they’d be able to grow/raise food of some sort on New Caprica…and they must have for the year spent there before the Cylon arrival.
Perhaps. Right now, the feeling I get is that humanity isn’t going anywhere unless the Cylons somehow let them. I think that Caprica 6 and Sharon might in some way help our heros return to Rag-Tag fleet status.
I think they may have been starving her, and/or she was traumatized enough she refused to eat (she wanted to die anyway). But when Baltar offered her some decent food she took it.
It might be fun if there really is a difference in philosophy among the Cylons regarding humans. Maybe the human-accepting Cylons are going to end up on the run along with the surviving humans, trying to escape the rest of the Cylons bent on wiping out the rest of the humans as well as boxing the “defective” Cylons.
That’s kinda my thoughts on this as well. I know Moore et al were really stoked about how the new season was shaping up back in July at Comic-Con. So was Olmos, which is even more encouraging. I don’t mind the planet arcs, but please, Ron…get us back into space soon! I want to see the Galactica kick some toaster ass!
I watched this with a fellow Galactica nut the day the discs arrived (last Monday, the day before official release; thanks, Amazon). At this moment, we both looked at each other. “Did she just say…” So we backed it up, and yep, she does. So at the end, we switched over to audio commentary and went back to that scene, to see if Moore and/or Eick would say anything, even in passing. “Hey, they do it on ‘Rescue Me’ and ‘The Shield,’ so why not?” Nope, nothing; they’re jabbering on about something else. I wonder if they’ll try to give it another airing later.
Anyway, yeah, the extended Pegasus is pretty much the only version of that episode now for me. Don’t think I’ll ever go back to look at the shortened one.
That would seem logical, it’s clear that Boomer wants to be human, or at the very least, accepted by the Galactica crew, Adm. Adama clearly wants to trust Boomer again, but he knows he can’t, as Boomer Rev. 1.0a eventually succumed to her programming (maybe the BBB on the BoomerStar uploaded the latest version of Norton ToasterDoctor to her, and it fixed her Permissions files and reset her superuser password…), and he can’t take the chance that the Toasters were able to use ToasterPort wireless networking (802.11 ZXZ?) to update her OS to the latest Sleeper.kext file…
It’s clear that HeadSix loves Baltar, as does Caprica Six, she also has more in common with Humanity than Xenabot…err Lawless’s character, Doral, the doctor dude, and PreacherBot 2.0 (i wonder if he still follows the scriptures laid down in the tenets of Robotology) seem to be less sympathetic to humans
i could sort of see CapricaSix and Boomer 2.0 (Caprica) and 3.0 joining up with humanity, Boomer 2.0 has been extremely helpful to the Galactica and has either repartitioned the hard drive partition containing Toaster commands, or at the very least archived those files and compressed them and moved them to backup storage
the Boomer and Six dynamic definitely adds a sense of mystery to the show, we want to trust them, they want to be accepted by humans, but can they repress their essential Toaster nature
it’d be even tougher for poor Six (and Baltar as well), if the news ever got out that SHE was the one directly responsible for compromising Colonial defenses (gotta watch out for that insidious Toaster Spyware…), there’s no way the RTF would EVER accept her…