Now please don’t give any spoilers. I just finished Season 2.5 and I am convinced that the death of Admiral Kane was the Jumping of the Shark.
Either that or I am just coming to realize what a shitty leader Admiral Adama really is. When Baltar’s nuke went off on Cloud 9 that’s when you dissolve the Civilian government and jump away from New Caprica. Cloud 9 would have been the equivalent of New York City, a high percentage of their population, and the nuke took out ships that were near to Cloud 9 reducing the population of the human race significantly.
Now this show has had some really convenient plot devices to drive the story along and I’ve put up with them accepting them as limitations of the medium being that this show IMO exceeds expectations by a wide margin, it’s better than Star Trek or Star Wars could have ever hoped to be.
The end of Season 2.5 leaves me feeling cold though. It doesn’t make sense that people would be living in tents on the surface of New Caprica. Why move off of the ships until they have a real working base camp on the ground? Why reduce their military force so that they are too weak to fight the Cylon fleet when it arrives. Why leave a criminally negligent twit like Baltar in charge when his nuke kills so many people?
And this leads me to my final problem. Where the fuck is the Patriotism on Battlestar Galactica? This has bothered me the whole series. Everyone is always pissed off at the military. What happened to the hero worship? When we had a couple buildings in America go down everyone was ‘RA RA America’ to the point where it was intimidating not to be. I’d think that if the human race on 12 planets were nearly extinct people would be in love with the military that is keeping them alive.
I’m afraid of Season 3 because I think that the Shark hath been jumpethed.
I gave up about halfway through season 3. I don’t know if it jumped the shark, it just sucked. Maybe it got better immediately after, but judging by the lack of Galactica-based conversations I seen, I don’t think so.
Yeah, gee thanks military for protecting the 12 colonies so well!
I didn’t think a shark was jumped at the point you’ve reached, the first half dozen or so episode in series 3 are very powerful and intense*. There’s a couple of clunkers in the middle, but it picks up again towards the end. The Razor TV movie, concerning events on Pegasus, is excellent, btw.
episode 4 (?) includes the best, most kickass, scene I’ve seen on a TV show.
The first…5 (I think) episodes I really enjoyed. But I felt that most of the season really sucked.
There was one poster who was adamant that they were mucking it up a la x-files with super-complicated mythology and mysticism and whatnot. I thought he was a bit harsh getting on that train so early…but by the end of the season I agreed with him.
I guess I’ll watch out of habit, and to leer at Tanmoh Penniket, but I definitely channel surf during it sometimes-this year I watched it off I-tunes and towards the end I was in the habit of checking email and just listening to the audio.
Razor is out? I thought it wasn’t being released till the end of November. When did it debut?
People will desperately believe what they want to. If you’d spent a year aboard a 747 or the hold of a cargo freighter, with no certainty that you’d ever see anything but four metal walls ever again, you’d be more willing to believe people who claimed (1) The Cylons have given up looking for us (2) They couldn’t find us here if they were. The tent city and stripping the defense forces was indeed premature, but Baltar got elected by pandering to what people wanted, however unwise.
As for the lack of respect for the military: before the Cylon attack it had been forty years since anyone had seen or heard from the Cylons, and only some old fossils still remembered from personal experience what actual war was like. Complacency had set in, the military had become bureaucratized, recruits saw it as a way of paying for college, and people were grumbling about the expense of maintaining those asteroid-sized battlestars. Then when the Cylons DO show up, they wipe out all resistance in a few hours and slaughter all but a handful of refugees. Not the Colonial Defense Force’s most shining moment. A handful of paranoids wonder if the CDF was infiltrated by the Cylons all along.
Remember, the Colonials had just learned the hard way (under Colonel Tigh) that military government Just. Doesn’t. Work. People died the last time they tried it. Also, while Rosslyn’s claim to the Presidency was rather a skin-of-the-teeth affair (she’s what, 38th in the line of succession?), Baltar had won a free and fair election under the Articles of Colonization. Adama is a military officer, serving in a military with a clear tradition of subordination to the civilian leadership - just as ours is.
So, with all this in mind - what the frak else is Adama going to do? He may not approve of Baltar’s approach to disaster management and defense - but at this stage in the game, his only option is to salute, say “Yes, Mr. President”, and carry out the lawful orders of his commander-in-chief. There’s no way the population would tolerate another dissolution of the civilian government.
I really like the premise of BSG and the underlying parallels it portrays to human society on Earth, but many of the storylines and even entire episodes veer wildly off-course and offer little to the series, other than maybe to fill out a 20 episode season. I can understand the creators/producers wanting to give depth and feeling to the main characters, but the do it so poorly and unevenly that it detracts from the series overall. I won’t give examples to spoil anything for the OP. In both seasons 2 & 3, the seasons begin and end strongly, but the middle episodes become sloppy and dull. This series would be better off as a 12 episode season that focuses more on the main storyline –that of the ragtag group of survivors, desperately fleeing from the crushing cylons. The attempts to portray man’s attempts to develop a society and all its ills within the fleet are mostly crap to me, and all of the political and military insubordination that Adama puts up with are unrealistic and just shows he’s a pussy.
I believe the new season will be the last, and a short one at 12 episodes. Let’s hope they finish the series strongly.
It was my opinion that it could be saved only by ending it, and Moore’s going to do that. One more season will hopefully mean we never have to watch Boomer do the ironing, or see an unwanted B-movie guest star on the show again. The possibility of a very strong finish is there. Keeping my fingers crossed.
Moore’s said that the network has pressured them to do more “stand alone” episodes as opposed to arc ones to avoid alienating new viewers who aren’t familiar with the backstory.
I do sort of like the idea of the realization that Adama is a pussy and a poor leader. At least that makes sense plotwise. Dissolving the government would be the right thing to do after Cloud 9 was destroyed, after all it was Baltar’s nuke that went missing, and it was supplied freely. Sure Adama doesn’t know that, but Baltar should be the FIRST suspect especially with Rosslyn talking about him with the blonde Cylon on Caprica. It sort of seems to me like in this scenario the human race really doesn’t have a drive to survive, at least not among the leadership. Rosslyn and Lee Adama are the most rational about the survival of the human species. As far as a standalone episodes go, as contrived as it was, I loved seeing Lee shoot the Mobster in the chest in cold blood. They need to start getting more ruthless.
I think one of the problems with the electorate is that they aren’t addressing how small the electorate is. They are small enough to have a centralized planned economy. The notion that people are starving because of economic issues is retarded. They should be sharing resources and managing those resources. It is conceivable that with a population of 50k the President can meet every single person she represents. Now that the population is about 30k it’s even easier. Everyone would be one degree of separation from the President, it’s like the mayor of a small city.
The only real explanation for why they would go for New Caprica after the Destruction of Cloud9 is that perhaps Cloud 9 was their main food source. This isn’t explained sufficiently though. They are light on the logistical explanation of how the fleet works. The Pegasus filled a lot of gaps. I was always wondering why a Battlestar wouldn’t have production facilities, and why the fleet wouldn’t think that supporting Chief Tyrol’s building of Blackbird is a high priority. Industrial manufacturing, food distribution, mining, medical, training and military concerns should be the main issues. There shouldn’t be any prostitutes, because every able bodied worker would be needed. There is a lot to be said for giving people an important purpose in life, the continued existance of the human race is certainly a driving force, and I should think that community would run high.
mswas, I think that they even have an electorate is a major problem. There are a small number of people, and one fighting ship, against an army. The fact that the military leader has to clear any decision is ludicrous. If they insist on having some sort of presidency, then I agree whole-heartedly that the presidency’s job is to centrally plan the distribution of resources. And a press? Un-be-fucking-lievable. If you are able to work, you are helping in the war effort. You nailed it when you said every able-bodied worker is needed. When you are down to 40-some odd-thousand people, it really is “you are either for us, or against us”, because anyone not helping you is hurting you.
There’s a lot that’s not addressed. I don’t see it necessarily as overall failure in the writing (although the writing is inconsistent - I’ve seen some of the best and worst TV I’ve ever seen during this series). I think they leave the above deliberately foggy. IMHO, the original 1970s series overplayed the resource contraint issue - seems like every episode was focused on them trying to find more fuel, food, water, etc. (and convieniently, a planet would appear, many colonized by some tribe of humans, to help them out). I like the current approach must better.
In terms of “There is a lot to be said for giving people an important purpose in life, the continued existance of the human race is certainly a driving force, and I should think that community would run high.”…well, who knows. The 12 colonies were somewhat fractured and antogonistic to one another, at least along cultural divides. Imagine if you put two “Earth” factions in space in a similar setting. Eventually if the odds seemed to great for overall group survival people would seek out their own best interests and ideas to personally survive. Kinda “Lord of the Flies.” I think the whole series somewhat focuses on how broken (and redeemable) the surviving humans are.
To the OPs point on Adama being a poor leader…maybe that’s the conclusion we’re left with. Maybe he came to it himself - the zeal in which he strives to rescue those on New Caprica in season 2.5+ seems to be driven more by personal guilt than a sense of professional responsibility. I think he just gave up when the fleet rallied around Baltar prior to the New Caprica settlement.
It’s worth sticking with…at least for Exodus Part II. That’s some ballsy TV.
I’ve only seen the episodes that have been released on DVD-- seasons one and two. If I pick up the Razor DVD, will the movie spoil any of the plot from the third season?
So…people are saying that Adama is a bad leader because, after an election result he didn’t like, he didn’t take the entire human race hostage, and force them to remain (at gunpoint) inside under-supplied unarmed ships?
Of course, I imagine that being in the military is, at that point, for life. Can’t have your soldiers muster out, because if you do, that’s your power base.
