My rambling thoughts on BSG after a full series run-through

[tighr]

RoJoHen wrote:

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Honestly, I'm surprised it managed to be as light-hearted as it was. Given the situation, I would have expected to see a lot of suicides and mental breakdowns.

There were, they just weren't shown on-screen most of the time. There were subtle references here and there to things going on among the fleet, though.

[Sindatur]

RoJoHen wrote:

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Honestly, I'm surprised it managed to be as light-hearted as it was. Given the situation, I would have expected to see a lot of suicides and mental breakdowns.

Actually that's exactly the point. Those who didn't "take a break" and crack a joke here and there and find some joy through all that and find a way to acclimate to the horrible climate, would be committing suicide and having mental breakdowns. The ones who remained functional couldn't do so without taking mental relief, they wouldn't be able to function as they were portrayed for so many years

[CorporalCaptain]

sonak wrote:

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5. It's a different show by late season 3. I've seen this point brought up a lot about the show. BSG goes from being a show about the survivors of Humanity making their way to Earth and fighting the Cylons to being dominated by angels, prophecies, and gods. You can really see the parallels to DS9 here, where the "Prophets" and Sisko as emissary arc became increasingly prominent whereas early DS9 was more politics-driven. Your mileage may vary on whether these elements made BSG a better show or not.

The debate of the merits of nuBSG has been done to death, and I don't want to enter into that again, so I won't comment on your other points. However, I did feel like this one point deserves clarification.

The original series of BSG took a similar turn with the arrival of the Ship of Lights and the Beings of Light, in "War of the Gods." The physical appearance of the nuBSG Final Five as beings of light is pretty clearly a shout-out to the BSG:TOS Beings of Light. Given what happened in BSG:TOS, the intervening of higher powers in nuBSG, who perform resurrection (in BSG:TOS it was Apollo who was resurrected), was completely logical and expected. This part of the story may have been influenced by DS9, since DS9 happened in the interim and Ron Moore worked on it, but it is plausible for it to have been exclusively something reimagined from the original BSG.

[sonak]

CorporalCaptain wrote:

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The debate of the merits of nuBSG has been done to death, and I don't want to enter into that again, so I won't comment on your other points. However, I did feel like this one point deserves clarification.

The original series of BSG took a similar turn with the arrival of the Ship of Lights and the Beings of Light, in "War of the Gods." The physical appearance of the nuBSG Final Five as beings of light is pretty clearly a shout-out to the BSG:TOS Beings of Light. Given what happened in BSG:TOS, the intervening of higher powers in nuBSG, who perform resurrection (in BSG:TOS it was Apollo who was resurrected), was completely logical and expected. This part of the story may have been influenced by DS9, since DS9 happened in the interim and Ron Moore worked on it, but it is plausible for it to have been exclusively something reimagined from the original BSG.

Interesting, thanks for the info. I haven't seen BSG TOS yet, so I wasn't aware of that. Still, nuBSG was meant to be darker and more realistic, so they could have dropped those elements had they wanted to.

[Dark Gilligan]

Religion was part of nuBSG from the very beginning. In the pilot episode Six explicitly tells Baltar that the Cylons are following God's plan. Baltar scoffed that Six would believe in something as primitive as religion. Later, when Head!Six first appeared, she tells Baltar she's one of God's messengers. Also in Season 1, Starbuck herself was linked to Aurora, the angel who would guide humanity to its new home. The series remained true to this philosophy throughout.

[Temis the Vorta]

I watched nuBSG for the charactez, including Starbuck, who was one of my faves. I don't need characters to be cuddly and likeable. Flawed characters who are well acted and reasonably well written are fine by me.

But I do need a premise to make fundamental sense. The plot never clicked because there was never a good, solid, sensible reason for the Cylons to attack humanity, at least not a rational one.

And if you're going to make a story hinge on irrational characters, then the last thing you should do is make your characters robots. How exactly is an irrational, humanoid robot anything other than a human being?

Ron Moore took the basics of BSG and crafted a new story out of it. I have no objection to that. But one fundamental part of BSG, the Cylons, really didn't fit the story he wanted to tell and the result was a story that made less sense as it went along.

He would have been better off either changing the premise even more fundamenally, or perhaps not pretending it had anything to do with some other show called BSG, and just created a brand new series under a new name. Maybe he had no choice and the BSG label was slapped onto the show just so the SyFy suits would be less nervous.

[Sindatur]

Dark Gilligan wrote:

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Religion was part of nuBSG from the very beginning. In the pilot episode Six explicitly tells Baltar that the Cylons are following God's plan. Baltar scoffed that Six would believe in something as primitive as religion. Later, when Head!Six first appeared, she tells Baltar she's one of God's messengers. Also in Season 1, Starbuck herself was linked to Aurora, the angel who would guide humanity to its new home. The series remained true to this philosophy throughout.

Yea, I've never understood the arguments that "In S3 it went all Religious". It was that way from the Pilot, yea, halfway or more through the Series they revealed more of it, but, it was always there bubbling, waiting for it's proper time to surface

[CorporalCaptain]

Sindatur wrote:

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Yea, I've never understood the arguments that "In S3 it went all Religious". It was that way from the Pilot, yea, halfway or more through the Series they revealed more of it, but, it was always there bubbling, waiting for it's proper time to surface

Yeah, I agree with this, too. Although I may not have expressed them well, my remarks were not intended to contradict this point; they were only intended to point out that the intervention of higher powers, in particular to resurrect Starbuck, paralleled events depicted in the original series.

[Mars]

tighr wrote:

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That only makes sense if the person in the military to overthrow Hitler didn't subsequently start sleeping with Hitler.

Was refering to Tom Zarek more than anyone else.

[Mars]

JRS wrote:

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I personally cared for the characters myself.
True they were sometimes bit too edgy,
but honestly they felt often more real, than people in many other Tv-shows.
I also really liked the Adama-Roslin relationship. It showed nicely the more caring and tender side of Adama( yes, he had that side).

NuBSG was not a perfect show, but it is a damn good one.
Lots of good drama, interesting characters, plot twists you don't see coming..and some cool action,too.
Plus the cast was very talented and so was the writing

You need good character interactions when you don't have the "planet of the week" format that Star Trek relies on so heavily. You see the Enterprise's crew is not all that interesting from a dramatic standpoint, most of the drama comes from outside the Enterprise, not from within, in BSG you don't have a lot of interesting things outside the Fleet and the Galactica, therefore you have to make the crew interesting, you got to generate conflicts from within. Star Trek doesn't have a lot of internal conflicts, it is usually the outsider that causes trouble.

[Mars]

MacLeod wrote:

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The question is how would we expect people to react when practically speaking, their entire civilisation has been wiped out?

The original BSG series made light of that fact, their civilization got destroyed, they quickly got over it and it became all about exploring the next planet. Thematically the original Battle Star Galactica wasn't that different from Star Trek. All they did was visit one lost colony of humans after another while having a "video arcade" of shooting down cylons in between.

[Mars]

Temis the Vorta wrote:

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I watched nuBSG for the charactez, including Starbuck, who was one of my faves. I don't need characters to be cuddly and likeable. Flawed characters who are well acted and reasonably well written are fine by me.

But I do need a premise to make fundamental sense. The plot never clicked because there was never a good, solid, sensible reason for the Cylons to attack humanity, at least not a rational one.

They don't need a rational one if their leader Cavil - Cylon Model 1 is irrational. Lots of wars are started by one'e irrational beliefs, including World War II. The Germans did not have a rational sensible reason to attack Poland, but they did anyway. Cavil is the one consistently bad guy in BSG more than anyone else, he is the "Baltar" of this new series, though he doesn't make a personal appearance until later in the series, it is his actions that drive the Cylon War against humanity.

And if you're going to make a story hinge on irrational characters, then the last thing you should do is make your characters robots. How exactly is an irrational, humanoid robot anything other than a human being?

Ron Moore took the basics of BSG and crafted a new story out of it. I have no objection to that. But one fundamental part of BSG, the Cylons, really didn't fit the story he wanted to tell and the result was a story that made less sense as it went along.

He would have been better off either changing the premise even more fundamenally, or perhaps not pretending it had anything to do with some other show called BSG, and just created a brand new series under a new name. Maybe he had no choice and the BSG label was slapped onto the show just so the SyFy suits would be less nervous.

[sonak]

Dark Gilligan wrote:

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Religion was part of nuBSG from the very beginning. In the pilot episode Six explicitly tells Baltar that the Cylons are following God's plan. Baltar scoffed that Six would believe in something as primitive as religion. Later, when Head!Six first appeared, she tells Baltar she's one of God's messengers. Also in Season 1, Starbuck herself was linked to Aurora, the angel who would guide humanity to its new home. The series remained true to this philosophy throughout.

these things were there, but could have gone the route that Trek often did, where there were naturalistic(albeit far-fetched) explanations for various things. Or they could have been proven to be not there altogether. In the latter half of the series though, those themes dominate the show, and it becomes more and more literal regarding religion. By the end, it really WAS all part of "God's" plan.


It's like I said with DS9- the "prophets" were just background wormhole aliens in the first few seasons, before they began to resemble literal Bajoran gods more and more, even giving Sisko a divine birth, and fighting "fallen demons" in caves. One of the reasons I prefer early-to mid DS9 over late DS9.



Gods make poor drama for the most part-they turn mortal characters into puppets.

[Hartzilla2007]

sonak wrote:

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these things were there, but could have gone the route that Trek often did,

Except NuBSG is not Star Trek.

[sonak]

Hartzilla2007 wrote:

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Except NuBSG is not Star Trek.

thanks for pointing that out. Up until I read your post, I had watched that series and been commenting it on this thread while under the assumption that BSG was actually the sixth Star Trek television series, but like Enterprise originally, did not include the words "Star Trek" in the title.

Your post has forced me to re-evaluate the way I've been looking at this series, and I am grateful to you for providing me with this valuable information, and I will make good use of it in my future analyses of the themes, characters, and plots of BSG.