One feature of the original Battlestar Galactica series was that the fleet kept encountering isolated pockets of humanity that were forgotten offshoots of the Twelve Colonies – a prison world, an Old West world, etc. That hasn’t happened in the new series. Have they made an actual creative decision to change that, or is it just something that hasn’t occurred to them yet? Anybody have a WAG?
Given that they’ve been losing people at an alarming rate, only started with 50,000, and have forbidden fraternization between crew members (e.g. Boomer and crew chief), I’d think they’d better find some people pretty soon.
(It sort of bugs me that BSG has this whole stupid Presidential politics thread going on when a population that size could be reasonably managed by a mayor and a Board of Selectman.)
I think the Boomer/Tyrol relationship was nixed because it was between an officer and a non-com. I’m pretty sure the military today still forbids “fraternization between the ranks”; I’m sure it did not too long ago anyway.
Yep, but when your population has been reduced to a barely sustainable gene pool, the only sensible thing to do is to start breeding as fast as possible. And you can’t really argue that Boomer is a trained fighter pilot because you wouldn’t be sending your (hot) fecund females off into battle under any but the most dire circumstances.
The difference between a president and a mayor is not just the size of the population to be governed but the scope of duties. A mayor is not responsible for defense or foreign policy – nor even with legislation in general, which is handled at the state or national level. But the president of the Twelve Colonies is responsible for, so far as they know, the survival of the entire human race. It makes perfect sense they should treat the job as a crucially important one. It does not make much sense that their government should continue to be organized along the lines of the Twelve Colonies, since those no longer exist, except as tribes mixed up throughout the fleet – but maybe they prefer to leave the Articles as they are, to emphasize continuity, which reinforces the president’s authority.
Well, I’d say not until they find a planet or planets suitable for habitation, and out of reach of Cylons. They’re living on space ships with very limited living space or consumable supplies. A population explosion could not be supported in their current situation. I’m just sayin’.
The current BSG doesn’t have the cliche’ that oxygen-atmosphere planets are a dime a dozen, like so many other SF series. When the Colonials found Kobol they were amazed and delighted that it was actually humanly habitable.
I’m too lazy to look it up, but wasn’t Boomer supposed to be from some mining outpost, not a Colony world? There might have been things like Tylium miners out in the boodocks, but if they had contact with the Colonies the Cylons would know where they were and presumably wiped them out.
Otherwise, in the vastness of outer space it would be a copout if the fleet “just happened” to run across, say, a band of cultists living inside an asteroid in the middle of nowhere.