Excelllent read IMHO. It's hard to believe that it's now been 10 years since the debut of the first season of BSG.


http://popwatch.ew.com/2015/01/14/battlestar-galactica-anniversary-decade-33-pilot/

What's funny is at the time no one knew it was the end of an era. Enterprise was still on the air, the Stargates were still on...

Technically SGU was the last conventional "space opera" series to air on TV, but as it failed after two years barely into its run, I think it safe to say that BSG was the last successful one to air.



The Jedi Master

We're also coming up on the 6 year mark since the show ended, I really miss this show, a new episode coming up was really something to look forward to.

The new BSG was almost as miraculous to me as the successful film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings was. Both were highly unlikely to accomplish (though for different reasons), and a lot of excellent decisions were made by the producers in both cases, proving that you could be seriously respecting the source material without giving up commercial success; even more, that respecting the source could actually become a prerequisite for commercial success.

Also, BSG owes to other successful TV shows that proved that "serious" storytelling was possible (e.g. the Sopranos) where you have difficult decisions, where things are left unanswered, where you have ambiguity, and a progressing universe rather than the average episode routinely ending as it started. Actions and decisions in BSG almost always had consequences.

BSG was good. Got into it late. Alas when my relationship of 6 years ended with the WTF was I doing with this girl, we split up the DVD BSG collection.

33 was amazing. Terrific writing. Might have to watch it again. BSG was up and down throughout it's run but the first season was, in parts, epic.

The first season was only 13 episodes so there were no "filler" episodes that tended to drag down the overall narrative of the show. I like all 4 seasons of the show but there were a couple of episodes in both season 2 and 3 that were extraneous and of a much lesser quality compared to the other episodes.

My story of watching BSG is similar to that episode of Portlandia where the couple starts to watch it on a whim and end up not moving from the couch until it is finished. I think I have Panzermeyer's BSG commentary here at SimHQ to thank for that (same with X Files). If Game of Thrones continues with the same overall quality I have been seeing, it will be another fine example of what non-Hollywood TV can do to turn out epic cinematic storytelling.

One major difference of course being that BSG started from a flimsy backstory from a 25 year old TV show and filled it out, while GoT is more about making stuff from a book fit into just 10 hrs.




The Jedi Master

I wonder what the execs think of their "Dump sci fi friday and bring in WWE" move now, since it has moved to USA network, lol, they are stuck with relying on their direct to tv movies.

Last I checked, MGM pulled rights to Air SG1, Atlantis and Universe from SyFy.

If they cant reach a deal w/ a network on a new series it goes back to Devlin.
SGU will not be revived.

Seeing as one of the old SG:Alliance games all of a sudden is now back in development.

I'd rather they work on Stargate Worlds, which was 98% complete, but the development team had personal issues.

The last alpha was pretty much very playable and only needed some polish and UI elements fixed.

One of these F2P sponsor studios could have picked it up cheap when MGM seized the IP from CME and then finished it pretty easily.

I enjoyed BSG up to a point but could never watch it again knowing that they had no idea who the cylons would be and just made it up as they went along.

Dude, the last ep when the final 5 link and share memories, is prolly.the best scene for the 2nd half of the series.

I'm with Tigerwulf, despite liking many parts of the series the signal-to-noise ratio eventually got too high somewhere later into season 3 and I went on to watch other things (like TOS )

I don't think i was clear by what I meant by 'they'. I was referring to the writers.

They pulled the final 5 out of their arses. You can't rewatch the programme and notice little subtle hints or things you missed out on. Kinda like lost

Neither Lost or BSG had a fully planned out and written 5 year arc from the beginning. Babylon 5 was unique in that respect until relatively recently when you had shows based on books like Game of Thrones.

Yeah by kinda like lost I meant I can't rewatch that because it's the same as BSG.

I rewatched the pivotal scene where Starbuck & Apollo have to destroy the 'Olympic Carrier'. Did He say, "Burn" when he opened fire on the ship?

The last alpha was very playable, but I don't know if I'd have called it 98% complete This pretty much sums up the story http://archive.azcentral.com/arizonarepu...ends-court.html and well you can see why no one scooped in to pick it up

But with Emmerich set to reboot the movies I'm afraid we won't get anything from the TV shows again, especially since he didn't like them at all...

Back on topic though. BSG. I first started watching it on netflix a few years back, when they just had the series and not the mini-series to start it. If you start watching it with 33, not knowing anything at all about it, well it was crazy and got me hooked.

When I went back and watched it later with the wife, the mini-series that was the start of the new series was available. So we watched that first, 33 then wasn't as much "fun" that way, but still great. I miss space opera's, then again, I haven't had cable in a long time either (only show I ever bought from amazon was SGU when it was airing cause of a lack of cable), so if something new came out, I probably wouldn't get to see it for awhile anyway and now I'm sad lol

"Stargate" is really the only thing I like from Emmerich. Everything else from "Independence Day" to "2012" ranges from mediocre to terrible IMHO.

As for BSG, I bought the initial release bluray boxed set which came with a cylon centurion model.

I couldn't agree more. I didn't really pay attention to who directed Stargate when I first saw it, and then later, after "Independence Day" and some of his other movies, I realized he directed Startgate and was really surprised, as it was actually pretty good.