It's no secret on SimHQ that I'm a rabid fan of the new Battlestar Galactica but I saw something last night that reminded me again why I love it so.

It's the episode titled "Deadlocked" from season 4.5 where,

Yes, absolutely. A tricky thing is to have characters evolve and change and surprise the audience in some way, but still stay true to their core identity. Like Baltar, he went through different roles and situations and ways he viewed himself but was always Baltar.

We need some BSG mood icons!

I'll make a request to Doug. Maybe after I hit my 60k I'll have some clout.

Here's some good ones...

Those are great!! I love them.

I started watching these since Netflix has them streaming in HD. Been chewing through them really fast, enjoying the heck out of them. Got to the Pegasus episode last night, the season 2 cliffhanger. I plan to stop when they build the settlement since that's when i started hating the direction of the show and the FUBAR'd characters. I also find myself much more annoyed with the Baltar/6 angel thing relationship.
Still, it's otherwise brilliant in the start with some great episodes.

I think the New Caprica arc was brilliant but to each their own.

Well I would at least watch to the end of "Exodus 2", some exciting stuff in that one if you haven't already seen it.

You could then skip ahead to "Maelstrom" to the end of Season 3 and then onto 4 if you like those. There are somewhat mediocre filler episodes in middle of Season 3.

"Dirty Hands", "A Day in the Life" and "The Woman King" were weaker episodes but still quite watchable IMHO.

Oh, I personally agree, but for someone not enjoying the way season 3 is going I would skip them.

Well, one might say it was karma as she does kill that infant in the beginning of the miniseries!




The Jedi Master

Excellent point. I hadn't thought of that until you mentioned it!

A favorite moment:

When I saw her outrage at the Colonials' plan to destroy the resurrection ship, the first thing I thought of was "that's what you get for killing that baby, #%&*$#." Same for when she saw the tortured & catatonic #6 copy in Pegasus' brig.

I remember when I listened to the audio commentary for the miniseries Ron Moore mentioning how shocked many of the tv viewers were with that scene where Caprica 6 snaps the neck of the infant.

FYI, it isn't the "new" BSG. It is the only BSG worth talking about!

Good point even though I think Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict were very good in the original BSG even with all the cheesiness around them.

Also, 75 episodes beats 17 any day. And Hatch was better in real BSG than he was in the '78 BSG.

Perhaps, but something tells me if 20 yrs from now someone "reimagines" Firefly and it lasts 4 yrs it won't be better than the 14+2 we have right now.



The Jedi Master

That's a no-brainer. Tom Zarek was an infintely more complex and interesting character than the original Apollo who was basically a Luke Skywalker type.

And a "reboot" is still a remake and not really an original show.
"Old" and "new" work just fine.

The way I resolve the two is this.

"Old" BSG is the tale told by the descendents after their arrival at Earth, several generations removed. All human weakness removed, all are heroes, the cylon enemy is the enemy, Baltar is evil and a traitor, Cain and Starbuck are Men, just as primitive tribal society demands. "New" is the documentary that shows what really happened.

I was just at Borders and they had the BSG board game on sale for 1/2 off. Picked it up to lots of eye-rolls from the wife. Need a way to play online.

I just watched "Someone to Watch Over Me" tonight. What a fraking brilliant, brilliant episode and what a fantastic job by Katee Sackhoff and the guy who played the .

I got goosebumps when Starbuck started playing the All Along the Watchtower theme on the piano and Tigh recognized it.

That's a great way of seeing it!

Oh man, best blogging on the internet, ever, regarding that. I am of course talking about Bear McCreary's BSG blog, and the "Someone to Watch Over Me" journal. Where else can you get snippets of the score for the piano and such a hugely in-depth analysis of the show, cast and script?

One of my favourite episodes too!

Part I: http://www.bearmccreary.com/blog/?p=1597
Part II: http://www.bearmccreary.com/blog/?p=1599
Part III: http://www.bearmccreary.com/blog/?p=1598

If you've not seen these before PanzerMeyer, let me know what you think, I suspect you'll enjoy, it's a brilliant read.

Cheers, Spinner

Bear's blogs are great reading. Neat how in "Someone" the music plays such a direct role. I *loved* the musical end where Tyrol goes upstairs and falls to his knees when he realizes what's going on, just brilliant. A really great episode.

Watched so far a few episodes into season 2.5. Stopped to watch Razor for the first time---AWESOME.
I still think Cain was delusional, but it does fill in some gaps regardless.

Isn't Starbuck's "tune" the one that keeps recurring in every other episode? I'm just really noticing that on this play through.

Gotta say, I don't buy that they didn't know where to end up with the show. I think they at least had an idea about events and the final cylons early on.

I love it! LOL

That's awesome! And it kinda works for me!

I gotta admit I really enjoyed the original, at least the first bunch, but towards the end the old one got quite lame. And it never got a REAL ending either.

The new one...wow. Well, not everything about it works for me: Hummvees and Mercedes 150,000 years ago!?!? Really destroys my sense of illusion, and I hate that they nuked my hometown...but otherwise I really like it.

SUV's popularity rises and falls.
All of this has happened before, all of it will happen again...

I haven't read these yet but I'll check them out today. Bear is just full of awesomeness.

I dont think Cain was delusional at all. Delusional implies that she didn't have a grasp of reality. She definitely had a grasp of reality but her approach to fighting the Cylons and survival was flawed. To her, survival was the overriding priority and anything and everything that she had to do to guarantee survival was fair game. This is where she differed from Adama where he felt that if you go around committing atrocities then you're not even worthy of survival in the first place. Remember what Adama told Starbuck when he called her when she was in the C-I-C of Pegasus with Cain? Something to the effect that survival alone is not enough but that you have to be worthy of survival.

Ron Moore mentions in one of the episode podcasts that the Final 5 were not determined until sometime during early season 3 so anything you might see in the miniseries, season 1 and season 2 that may appear to be a "clue" is not.

Cain was delusional since she thought they were at war with the Cylons. They weren't. The war was over and they lost miserably.
Adama and the fleet were in survival mode, like Cain should have been. At least, after joining the fleet. Of course, she phrased it as all of Adama's ships as being the ones joining the fleet (her). LOL
Cain should have had the intelligence to form her own fleet with the civilian ships and gotten them out of there instead of stealing the FTL drives. She failed horribly in her doing job. The only thing I think she may have been right about was returning to Caprica to retake it.

All I know is I delayed getting into BSG out of respect for my Stargate Fanboyism, but once I watched 2 episodes I was hooked.

The Glory Days of SciFi are gone, SG1, Atlantis, BSG.

That is what I thought about BSG. I was wrong.

The first was just a 17 episode pilot that was canceled.

I remember being depressed as hell when the original BSG was cancelled. I was 6 years old and it was by far my favorite tv show while it was on the air. I watched it religiously every week with my dad.

You are old!

Absolutely amazing show, with first-class attention to detail, up until halfway through series 3. Then it got far too soap-opera for my liking. I still love it, though.

It did falter a bit mid-S3 thanks to the extravagant budgets used in the beginning few eps that meant they had to do a lot of cheap "character only" eps in the middle that they didn't have enough ideas to cover. The end of S3 redeems it.



The Jedi Master

There's no doubt that the direction and tone of the show changed after the New Caprica arc. The supernatural component which had always been there since the mini-series came to the forefront. Many fans had a problem with that. I did not.

I am much like RDM, militantly agnostic... but I found all that religious stuff some of the most interesting things they did in the later parts of the series.

I think you guys will get a kick out of this.

http://io9.com/#!5747992/the-real-battlestar-galactica-series-bible

Next up on the re-watch queue is "Bastille Day", one of the lesser 1st season episodes, but introduces the very interesting Tom Zarek. Cally gets a little more screen-time as well, and Apollo is first thrust into a more political, mediatory role.

Ron Moore mentions in the podcast that he and the writers were thinking of killing off Callie in that episode but they decided against it since they felt the episode was already very dark. Can you imagine if that had been done though? The whole Tyrol/Callie relationship thing would have been thrown out the window!

Some people would have loved to have seen Callie die earlier. I found parts of her arc annoying but her death at least had meaning in the grand scheme of things.

The other interesting "what if" is Billy. Had Paul Campbell wanted to stay on the show it would have been interesting to see how his arc would have turned out.

I quite liked her, she went off the rails nicely when she started to suspect the truth, and I thought her death was one of the most powerful in the series.

Powerful and disturbing. I distinctly remember when I saw "The Ties That Bind" when it first aired and being rather sad and disturbed about the way Callie died. It almost felt surreal.

I have to say I'm not the best at seeing things coming, but the end of that sequence was a complete shocker for me at the time.

So I started rewatching BSG yesterday. I'm on "Water" at the moment. One interesting thing. Baltar mentions during the investigation that he's calculated the RTF of ~45k people will need 82 tons of grain, 85 tons meat, 119 tons fruit, 304 tons vegetables, 2.5 millions "JP's" water per week, minimum. Now we know that water's not a problem thanks to Galactica's recycling, but where the frak are they getting all that food?

My educated guess would be that the fleet had enough food on hand to last them for a while. Notice how in the middle of season 3 they did address the severe food shortage where they started looking for algae in space and processing it for its protein. Of course when they were on New Caprica they were growing their own food so at least for that time the fleet's food needs were taken care of.

They had some agriculture ships. They have problems along those lines later on though.

I guess it's supposed to be both. It seems like a big stretch to me that they could sustain that level of consumption for so long, but ultimately I guess it's a pretty small detail.

Last year I picked up the entire series for $15 each... and I also got Razor & The Plan.. I stumbled across the new BSG just before season 3 I think it was... SciFy was having a marathon.. I always felt that the original was like a StarWars ripoff.. I liked it.. but I always wonderd ... what was in it for Baltar.. Anyway.. after seeing the marathon I got hooked. That was it.. I remember the hooplah when it first came out.. and the hot scuttlebutt was that Boomer & Starbuck were women.. I kind of backed out because I was thinking... another T&A fest in space ala Cleopatra 2525 ... and granted I am a big Gina Torres fan.. but I like my SciFi with some kind of substance.. so I passed initially on the first season of BSG.. After I caught the marathon.. and I think it was the episode where Sharon met all the other Sharons... I promptly wen t to Blockbuster and rented season 1 , 1.5 & 2 and watched it over a weekend.. I was done... Hooked on this incarnation of BSG.

There was a free ware game that was based off the old Freespace called Beyond The Red Line ......It was ok.. but I had issues getting my controllers to work with it..



That was my sig pic on their forum..

I am pretty sure he would have been one of the final five.

Campbell was also asked to come back for that dream sequence in season 4 (during the cylon ship jumps) but he declined... because apparently he was still too cool for BSG.

What an idiot. I was glad when he got killed off. LOL

Where did you read that? In the commentary for that episode, Ron Moore mentioned that the writers had original intended Billy to be in the dream sequences but that later on they decided against that and figured that it would make more sense to have Alosha instead.

"#%&*$# took my ride" - Starbuck

Ah yes, when Sharon (later on Athena) takes the Cylon raider that Starbuck used to get to Caprica.

They decided against it because he said no. I believe his agent said it was a "scheduling conflict." I didn't read it anywhere. It is a fact anyway.

As I plan to watch the series again, I watched the Mini-Series this weekend. I loved the technical and tactical details in the first fight against the Cylons f.e. clearing the space with a barrage from enemy fighters before starting the Vipers. Very well thought out and believable IMO.

I'm currently in my second watch-through of the entire series and all I have left to do is listen to a few podcasts and watch the 2 part finale.

Another thing I liked about BSG was... They gave textbook lessons in Brevity... IN most cases except for the banter... which was actually bending the rules.. it was textbook use of brevity code...

Yep. That came from RDM's time with the navy. He mentions it a few times on the podcasts.

Hey Razorback, maybe you noticed something I didn't but I have 2 questions,


1. In "Hero", how did Novacek find the Colonial fleet after he "escaped" from the basestar?

2. At the very end of "No Exit", how did Boomer and Ellen know where to find the Colonial fleet?

I am sure there are answers to those questions but I don't remember them.

I don't think there ever was an explanation given for these things. I would also like to know why Col. Tigh and Ellen aged while the other three did not.

You mean about them aging during the progression of the show? Well there was really no way around that! Kate Vernon and Michael Hogan were significantly older actors compared to the other 3 actors who were part of the Final 5 so their aging was more noticable.

No, I mean how Tigh and Ellen knew Adama when they were younger. Tigh had been friends with Adama for quite a few years. When Tigh tells Adama that he is a Cylon, Adama even says that he couldn't be because he knew him when he was younger and Cylons don't age. Tigh kind of blows this off, saying something about how maybe he's a different type of skinjob. I expected this to be explained at some point, but it wasn't.

If the final five do indeed age, then during their thousand year journey from Earth they must have grown old and died many times and then resurrected again in a younger body. Presumably, Tigh and Ellen would have been resurrected at approximately the age they were when they first met Adama. However, when Ellen resurrects, she looks to be the same age she was when she died.

Yeah, I see exactly what you're talking about now. The simplest answer that I can give is that they never explained it because it was a loophole created by the fact that RDM, Eick and the writers didn't come up with the idea of the Final 5 until sometime during the production of season 3. As we all probably remember, there were those early episodes from season 2 that had the flashbacks with Tigh and Adama and Tigh was cleary made up to look younger. The logical conclusion to draw then is that when Ellen died on New Caprica and was resurrected, she should have been resurrected to a younger age and not the age she died at.

Indeed, the "old cylons" was one of the many reasons I didn't like the final five arc which I felt was an unnecessarily convoluted construct in general (and par for the course these days - every writer seems compelled to seek closed circularity).

From all said in the first few seasons Tigh and Adama went way, way back - past (seemingly, given the Cylon war flashbacks) the logical point of solid skinjob resurrection tech.

Watched Hero just last night. No explanation of any kind, it wasn't even questioned by them in the slightest until the confrontation at the end.
I like Bulldog, I wish they had used him again later on. Well, used the character/actor again, not "USED" him like they did in the storyline. That would just be mean. LOL

That point was brought up by Ron Moore in the podcast. Bulldog is a viper pilot so why didn't we see him in the pilot ready room in subsequent episodes?

1. The story explanation is that we can infer that Bulldog declined Adama's offer to rejoin the Colonial fleet and so he ended up living on one of the civilian ships. Maybe the same ship where Boxy was sent to? lol

2. The real world explanation was that the actor who played Bulldog was signed on as just a guest star to make one appearance and that's it.

#2 mainly I'm sure. I recognize him from other tv shows. He even had one of his own called MANTIS, a superhero in a power suit show. Pretty sure it was him at least.

Yup, you are correct. He got the guest star job on BSG because David Eick was one of the producers of M.A.N.T.I.S.

Love, love this pic.

http://www.pinkraygun.com/2011/02/11/starbucks-in-starbucks/

I like the picture!
If those quotes are from the interview I'm thinking of, he was pretty much taken out of context after bringing up some good points.
He was less coming down on the show than what an audience will tolerate these days due to the times changing.

He was just angry that someone was changing BSG and didn't ask him if it was cool.

His point is idiotic. The show has both strong male and female roles.

You're forgetting the laws of relativity. The 13th tribe didn't have jump tech, they had to travel at slower than light speeds, but if you're going close to light speed time distorts. What to the people of the 12 colonies was 2000 years was probably just a few years for the final five on board their ship.



The Jedi Master

I never thought about that...

Soon there will be four, glorious in awakening. Struggling with the knowledge of their true selves. The pain of revelation bringing new clarity. And in the midst of their confusion, he will find her, enemies brought together by impossible longing, enemies now joined as one. The way forward, at once unthinkable, yet inevitable. And the fifth, still in the shadow, will claw toward the light, hungering for redemption, that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering. I can see them all. The seven, now six, self-described machines who believe themselves without sin. But in time, it is sin that will consume them. They will know emnity, bitterness, the wrenching agony of the one splintering into the many. And then they will join the promised land, gathered on the wings of the angel - - not an end, but a beginning.

All this has happened before and will happen again...

We've seen that already. Every time you think people will forget about BSG another thread pops up about it.

Or Firefly.

Or *insert name of no longer running TV series here*.



The Jedi Master

LOL! I think Firefly has a clear lead in that category of shows no longer on the air having threads created about them.

I just watched Exodus part II and noticed one of the fleeing civilian ships has a Pan Am logo painted on with what looks like "PAN GAL" (Pan Galactic?) printed on it. Looked it up online and it is indeed a nod to Stanley Kubrick and 2001: A Space Odyssey's space liner.



Cool!

Good eye! Watched that not too long ago and didn't catch that.

Excellent catch jocko. Exodus Part 2 is one of my top 10 favorite BSG episodes of all time.

If only the ratings had been better.... imagine the awesome space battles we could have gotten in seasons 3 and 4. Budget stifles genius.

Not always. Many times its budget restrictions that spur on creativity and better ideas because it forces the director/writers/producers to come up with alternatives that they would have never thought of had they had all the money they wanted in the first place. It's happened countless times in films and tv shows.

You mean SOMEtimes.

I do find it interesting how the tv ratings for seasons 3 and 4 were lower than the first two seasons. I always wonder how much of that was due to viewers tuning out due to them being unhappy or bored with the changes in the show and how many tuned out because of the schedule change. In retrospect, the move to Sunday nights was NOT a good move. Season 1 originally aired over the Summer so I think that really helped in generating bigger ratings.

Most shows lose ratings every season. People seem to be under the impression that it is due to quality, but there is no clear correlation between quality and ratings. Some shows actually increase their ratings during critically panned seasons, while the critically praised seasons get their lowest ratings.

So, you can't really look to that as some measuring stick for why ratings increase or drop.

A majority of the nightly ratings don't come from hardcore fans of the show but the general viewer who just happens to check the show out that night.

Check out this graph. Clearly visible how the miniseries and season 1 was the peak and then it was downhill from there.

http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Nielsen_ratings_(TRS)

It had its best ratings on Friday nights during the summer paired with the Stargates. It had 2nd best during Friday nights during the regular network season paired with the Stargates. The separation from them hurt BSG because it was then paired with basically nothing. I remember on Sundays it was after The Dresden Files, and that did so poorly it lasted just one season.

I honestly don't get SFC's "let's take the big channels on head to head!" idea, it was stupid.



The Jedi Master

I really liked Dresden Files, so it's my fault that one was canceled. Happens every time.

Apparently Ron Moore's new show "Precinct 17" will be somewhat similar to Dresden Files as far as the basic premise goes.

Indeed!

But was that the only time it appeared? I'm don't think I noticed this one, but could have sworn I'd seen it in a different episode...season 2, in space maybe?!?

Hopefully RK won't like it.

Who is RK?

I don't know, but whenever he starts liking a show it gets canceled. What a jerk.

Oops, I got it now. I was drawing a blank at the time I guess!

That's pretty easy to do. Drawing a blank. It requires no artistic talent. Start with a blank medium, then proceed to do nothing.



The Jedi Master

I'm going to draw a blank painting and then see if I can sell it at some pretentious art show and make lots of money!

Hard answer? Because they weren't as consistent. They weren't as good. 'Exodus' was some of the best TV I've seen, full stop. Wonderful stuff. I don't think BSG ever reached those heights again.

Demystifying the Cylons was another problem - the less we knew about them in S1 & S2 the more sinister & actually quite frightening they seemed. By the time things got to Hotel Gaius in his 70's crimson PimpBaseStar I wasn't sure they'd taken the right direction. Further more around this time it became apparent that the writers had no idea what was happening, and late S3 & 4 for me lacked the writing discipline that had defined the show so far. It is okay to improvise the story and be flexible. It is not okay to show it so badly. Little things were very annoying? Roslin dying-cured-dying by Deus Ex Machina (indecision about the fate of characters not just limited to her - hiya Starbuck, and Tighclop's wife ) , Starbuck wondering around on a galactic #%&*$#-barge, Lee the fat Space-Lawyer. Battlestar Galactica apparently lacking much 'battle'.

I still bought the box set, because I liked the show on it's strengths enough to overlook this stuff, but it could have been a great deal more.

Fascinating post Sulman. Ron Moore even mentions in one of his podcasts that he and the writers didn't really know where to take the whole Fat Lee Adama storyline so they decided to end it abruptly and that's why you see him lose that weight after Exodus pretty fast!
As for me, I love the show in its entirety and I enjoy seasons 3 and 4 just as much as the first two seasons. There's no doubt that the show went through a lot of changes and sometimes those artistic risks paid off and other times they failed but I just admire Ron Moore and the writers for attempting those changes.

The best episode of the series was the season 3 finale so... wrong.

Crossroads? Respectfully, I thought it was okay. Exodus for me, or any of the Pegasus episodes from S2.

Michelle Forbes as Cain FTW! The Pegasus trilogy is among the top 10 episodes from the entire show for me.

Absolutely. I thought a strength of BSG was the very realistic depiction of certain character traits. Both of the Adamas were very well detailed with convincing strengths and weaknesses.

Cain was brilliant, too. The limits and dangers of extremes in personality. Disciplined to the point of tyranny.

And while I do like "The Plan" I thought "Razor" was the far superior of the two tv films.

Exodus was a great standalone 2-parter. You needed to know little about the show to appreciate them. They exemplified a serialized series that let the casual or first-time viewer enjoy it. The stuff with Hera was minor and if you didn't get it the rest was still great.

Crossroads was a great serialized episode. If you hadn't watched at least the 2nd half of S3 before it there was little point in watching it, but if you had the way everything came together there was great. I think a lot of the disappointment people had in S4 was based on how well S3 peaked and ended. It seems like they had fewer or simply lesser ideas for the S4 stories and people naturally had expected things to continue getting better.



The Jedi Master

Exodus sucked (I am just going to pretend anything you thought was awesome sucked now, the way you are pretending Crossroads wasn't the best episode ever).

Funny how I like both Crossroads and Exodus.

Crossroads obviously has (sorry, had) a lot more going on (Baltar's trial, 4 cylons 'waking up', stand off at the Ionian Nebula) but Galactica's jump in and out of New Caprica's atmosphere was nothing short of amazing.

My favorite line from the Crossroads 2 parter,

"It's coming from inside the fraking ship!!!!" - Saul Tigh

The entire 'wake up' scene was great. Anders' expression, they all humming the song.. LOL!

"Alright, that's enough God's dammit!"

I'm watching "A Disquiet Follows My Soul" (Season 4, Episode 12) and am laughing my ass off at this exchange. The Chief, Tigh, Helo, Apollo, Bill and Gaeta are at a meeting discussing upgrading the Fleet's FTL with cylon tech ...

Chief: "And that's conservative. Their technology -our technology- is way ahead of ours. Yours."

Tigh: "Maybe you'd like a chart to keep it all straight."

That's a great episode Whitestar directed by Ron Moore himself! Bear's music during the montage sequence when Laura is running around the hallways while Adama is in his quarters is amazing. I also love how that episode closes out with Adama and Roslin in bed together. Lol.

If I'm not mistaken, its a piece of "So Much Life"?

Beautiful music, I listen to Season 4's soundtrack all the time.

The track from that montage is called "Laura Runs" and it uses the Roslin & Adama theme that we first hear in season 2. However, I believe some of the theme is indeed used again in "So Much Life".

Also used in "Roslin and Adama Reunited".