Battlestar Galactica Movie Back On.

[Christopher]

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the original BSG's costume design -- considering that the show aired in the height of the "jiggle era," so named for its objectification of women -- is how much it didn't objectify women. There were few instances where female characters were dressed in revealing outfits -- Audrey Landers in "The Young Lords," Laurette Spang in a fairly skimpy red dress on some occasions -- but they were rare. There were a couple of early episodes where we saw female officers in their undergarments, but they were all-concealing flesh-toned leotards, vaguely titillating without actually being revealing. And yet the male characters were often shown in skimpy outfits, like the uniforms worn by the triad teams. (In the original, triad was a basketball-like game and pyramid a card game; they reversed that in the reboot for some reason.) It's one way in which the show defied the conventions of its era -- and later eras, come to that.

 

[JD]

I was just looking at the pages for both version's uniforms and discovered that there was at least one scene set during the First Cylon War in the RDM version, where we saw at least one character wearing a uniform that looks a lot like the original series uniforms. I'm not sure where this came from, I'm thinking Blood & Chrome since I never saw all of it, and it took place during the war.
It wasn't changed that much, and it still looks pretty good even in a modern series IMO.

 

[137th Gebirg]

I wouldn't mind another BSG. I started watching the original a while ago, and I have to say - I was expecting total cringe from it, but it's actually really good & interesting.

The scifi remake is frustrating, because it seems like a show I would really like, but I actually do get motion sickness from watching it, so i can only watch a little of it here & there. So it's hard to get invested.

For a movie I wouldn't mind a mixture of the old-school melodrama & new age grit.

I'm a fan of both. Loved both and saw the great strengths and weaknesses each one had.

I was ultimately quite disappointed in NuBSG's ending, though. Way too many unanswered questions:

• Who/what was Starbuck, really?
• Who/what were the "Head" people?
• Who/what was the Cylon "god"? Why does he/she/it not like to be called that?
  
• Who/what was the being referred to as "He Who Should Not Be Named" in the Book of Pythia for whom the Temple of the Five was built and dedicated? (and I don't mean Lord Voldemort) Count Iblis?
  
• If "our" Earth was completely new and different from the "other" Earth, where the Five came from, how could the 12 constellations in the Kobolian holographic "planetarium" be so closely resembling the star patterns of "our" Earth? That shouldn't be possible if the "other" Earth was only a couple of light-years away. Star patterns shift over great distance, not to mention stellar drift between the time the planetarium was built and the thousands of years after, at the arrival of the RTF. The constellation designs should have been completely unintelligible, and for them to have the same "old names" as what we use today?
• Why was there such an intentional attempt at including blatantly recognizable Earth-origin objects on Caprica and scattered throughout the fleet? Starbuck's Humvee? Cain's weapons display with Tommy guns, American and German WWII pistols? Galactica pilot ready-room shadowbox displays of USAF insignia? Pencils in the CIC labeled "made in China"? Reader's Digest compilation books? I understood the showrunner's intention of making this universe very relate-able and non-alien to the audience, but they took it to a degree that almost seem to be saying, for the longest time, "there's a hidden reason why all these Earth-like things are here". Something other than "Just 'cause, y'know...whatever"...
  
• They flirted with and implied the whole ancient aliens thing that made TOS BSG so interesting, just switching Egyptian cultural queues with Greco-Roman ones. What was the purpose of this, other than to imply an ancient astronaut link between the civilizations?

All in all, a very sloppy ending filled with a metric ass-ton of missed opportunities, IMO. Really hoping that, if this new BSG treatment delves back into TOS waters, they handle this with greater care. The one good thing about being a movie, is that they will be forced to focus on the main topic at hand, rather than fill hours of non-associated and red-herring fluff like NuBSG did towards the end. Every element presented will need to be tight and have purpose for existence (ideally, anyway).

Although I do agree with what others here have said, that it's more about the journey than finding the destination. Any kind of ending with this universe will likely be unfulfilling, I suspect.

 

[Marc]

I was just looking at the pages for both version's uniforms and discovered that there was at least one scene set during the First Cylon War in the RDM version, where we saw at least one character wearing a uniform that looks a lot like the original series uniforms. I'm not sure where this came from, I'm thinking Blood & Chrome since I never saw all of it, and it took place during the war.
It wasn't changed that much, and it still looks pretty good even in a modern series IMO.

just underneath the picture it indicates it's from on of the first cylon war flashbacks in Razor though must have been a blink and you miss it moment.

 

[137th Gebirg]

just underneath the picture it indicates it's from on of the first cylon war flashbacks in Razor though must have been a blink and you miss it moment.

That's definitely from Blood & Chrome. The costume designers wanted to have a call-back to some TOS sensibilities and the Dorleac designs. Young Adama wore a similar uniform under his flight suit, IIRC.

Ironically, as much as the TOS BSG crowd despised RDM's show, many of them actually applauded Blood & Chrome for harkening back to more of what they enjoyed about the original series. Many people agreed that it would have been a great show if it ever got picked up. Unfortunately, at the time, I think Caprica's abysmal performance and NuBSG fatigue so soon after its completion killed it in the crib. It was a good show, though.

 

[Christopher]

I was ultimately quite disappointed in NuBSG's ending, though. Way too many unanswered questions:

• Who/what was Starbuck, really?
• Who/what were the "Head" people?
• Who/what was the Cylon "god"? Why does he/she/it not like to be called that?

"God" was God, period, and the messengers were angels. Starbuck was some similar kind of supernatural manifestation. The show was telling us that all along, that the religious and mystical elements were real, but since it was cast in a "naturalistic" space-opera framework, that was hard for a lot of us to accept. I know I kept waiting for some rational explanation for it all, and it wasn't until the finale that I realized, hey, this was actually a magic-realist fantasy all along.

The original series included its own versions of angels and devils, but '70s censorship required it to pass them off as hyper-advanced aliens. The modern show was less restricted and thus was able to portray the supernatural and spiritual elements as the result of out-and-out divinity.

• If "our" Earth was completely new and different from the "other" Earth, where the Five came from, how could the 12 constellations in the Kobolian holographic "planetarium" be so closely resembling the star patterns of "our" Earth? That shouldn't be possible if the "other" Earth was only a couple of light-years away. Star patterns shift over great distance, not to mention stellar drift between the time the planetarium was built and the thousands of years after, at the arrival of the RTF. The constellation designs should have been completely unintelligible, and for them to have the same "old names" as what we use today?

Yeah, that one always bugged me. I think it may be a result of the producers changing their plans as they went along. My best handwave is that, given that there's evidently some force of destiny that compels the same ideas and cultural elements (and rock songs) to be reinvented over and over, maybe the humans of our Earth had some racial memory of the original constellations and assigned their names to similar groupings of stars in our sky. Although I doubt that entirely works.

• Why was there such an intentional attempt at including blatantly recognizable Earth-origin objects on Caprica and scattered throughout the fleet? Starbuck's Humvee? Cain's weapons display with Tommy guns, American and German WWII pistols? Galactica pilot ready-room shadowbox displays of USAF insignia? Pencils in the CIC labeled "made in China"? Reader's Digest compilation books? I understood the showrunner's intention of making this universe very relate-able and non-alien to the audience, but they took it to a degree that almost seem to be saying, for the longest time, "there's a hidden reason why all these Earth-like things are here". Something other than "Just 'cause, y'know...whatever"...

Part of it is surely the same reason Star Trek gave us a gangster planet and a Roman planet and a Nazi planet and so forth -- because it's cheaper to reuse existing Earthly stuff than to manufacture entirely alien stuff from scratch. You could just as well ask why Caprica City looked so much like Vancouver. They had to use what was available. (As for things like the pencils and the Reader's Digest books, they probably weren't intended to be legible and story-relevant, just put in as background dressing.)

 

[JD]

Christopher covered these pretty well, but I want to just go ahead and toss in my interpretations to.

I'm a fan of both. Loved both and saw the great strengths and weaknesses each one had.

I was ultimately quite disappointed in NuBSG's ending, though. Way too many unanswered questions:

• Who/what was Starbuck, really?

• Before her death Starbuck was a relatively normal person, but after she died she was sent back by God to guide the Colonists to our Earth. Once they got to the new Earth, she had finished her task and was taken away.

  [*]Who/what were the "Head" people?

  I had assumed they were supposed to be Angels, but the Battlestar Wiki just calls them messengers. Baisically they were exactly what they said they were all along.

  [*]Who/what was the Cylon "god"? Why does he/she/it not like to be called that?

  It literally was God, or at least a god.

  [*]Who/what was the being referred to as "He Who Should Not Be Named" in the Book of Pythia for whom the Temple of the Five was built and dedicated? (and I don't mean Lord Voldemort) Count Iblis?

  I honestly don't remember this, but if there is a God then it makes sense that their would be a Devil too.

  [*]If "our" Earth was completely new and different from the "other" Earth, where the Five came from, how could the 12 constellations in the Kobolian holographic "planetarium" be so closely resembling the star patterns of "our" Earth? That shouldn't be possible if the "other" Earth was only a couple of light-years away. Star patterns shift over great distance, not to mention stellar drift between the time the planetarium was built and the thousands of years after, at the arrival of the RTF. The constellation designs should have been completely unintelligible, and for them to have the same "old names" as what we use today?

  I think Christopher is probably right this is just a case of the writers changing their minds as the show went along.

  [*]Why was there such an intentional attempt at including blatantly recognizable Earth-origin objects on Caprica and scattered throughout the fleet? Starbuck's Humvee? Cain's weapons display with Tommy guns, American and German WWII pistols? Galactica pilot ready-room shadowbox displays of USAF insignia? Pencils in the CIC labeled "made in China"? Reader's Digest compilation books? I understood the showrunner's intention of making this universe very relate-able and non-alien to the audience, but they took it to a degree that almost seem to be saying, for the longest time, "there's a hidden reason why all these Earth-like things are here". Something other than "Just 'cause, y'know...whatever"...

There are two explanations for this one, Christopher's real world one, and an in universe one. The in universe explanation goes back to the "all of this has happened before, and will happen again". Besically our civilization is cyclical, and we are simply recreating things that have happened in the previous cycles. I know the exact names and stuff probably wouldn't cross cycles, so I think it's best to just ignore those little details and just accept the big picture intention there.

• 
  

  [*]They flirted with and implied the whole ancient aliens thing that made TOS BSG so interesting, just switching Egyptian cultural queues with Greco-Roman ones. What was the purpose of this, other than to imply an ancient astronaut link between the civilizations?

  See above.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Christopher covered these pretty well, but I want to just go ahead and toss in my interpretations to.

• Before her death Starbuck was a relatively normal person, but after she died she was sent back by God to guide the Colonists to our Earth. Once they got to the new Earth, she had finished her task and was taken away. I had assumed they were supposed to be Angels, but the Battlestar Wiki just calls them messengers. Baisically they were exactly what they said they were all along. It literally was God, or at least a god. I honestly don't remember this, but if there is a God then it makes sense that their would be a Devil too.I think Christopher is probably right this is just a case of the writers changing their minds as the show went along.

There are two explanations for this one, Christopher's real world one, and an in universe one. The in universe explanation goes back to the "all of this has happened before, and will happen again". Besically our civilization is cyclical, and we are simply recreating things that have happened in the previous cycles. I know the exact names and stuff probably wouldn't cross cycles, so I think it's best to just ignore those little details and just accept the big picture intention there.

• 
  See above.

I hear what you (and Christopher) are saying, but my point is that I think the writers kind of ran out of time because their ratings weren't doing very well (pretty steady downward trend since the series premiere "33") and they cut a lot of storyline corners leaving far too much to the audience to try to noodle out for themselves. Now, mind you, I'm not interested in being spoon-fed all the answers. Some things can certainly be left up to the imagination, but why not delve deeper in the core mysteries that were the underpinnings of the show from the very beginning? It's like they left all the "naturalistic" stuff totally bare bones and in the open, but the more metaphysical aspects that drove the current and motivations of damn near all the characters were pretty much set aside and not given much in the way of additional fleshing out.

In TOS, we didn't know who/what the Beings of Light really were, but we didn't need to because we had a clear sense that they had a hand in the bigger picture of what was going on in the world. We understood their motivation, especially when we were introduced to "John" (played by Edward Mulhare) who provided us with even more information about their mission and how the Colonials were a part of it. We also had Count Iblis, a creature of immeasurable evil who was likely responsible for the evolution of the original reptilian Cylons into cybernetic creatures (hence the intentional usage of Patrick MacNee's voice in the Imperious Leader), who was clearly not keeping the Colonials' interests at heart. We understood his motivation. There was a clear sense that there was a "grand chess game" being played by these beings on a cosmic/ethereal level, while the Cylons and Colonials were mere pawns in that game. Incidentally - that's one of the more interesting things that happened in Babylon 5, in the war between the Shadows and the Vorlons, with the humans and other younger alien races getting caught in the middle. THAT show did it right. Ultimately, we never really knew what they were, but we were shown enough to get a good idea of what was going on in the bigger picture. TOS BSG started doing this as well and likely would have done more had the network suits not meddled in its production so severely before dying such a premature death. NuBSG started up with promise but then quickly muddied it up and cast many things aside without really giving us a sense of what was going on at the "macro" level. I guess that's my biggest problem with it. It was too "micro". A series of such an epic scope should be more "macro", if that makes any sense.

Oh, well. A new one's coming (hopefully). Let's see what they make of it. Either way, I'm guaranteed to see it, so come what may!

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ I always assumed that the "Cylon God" frequently spoken of in nuBSG was in fact Count Iblis. It'd sure fit his M.O.

 

[137th Gebirg]

^ I always assumed that the "Cylon God" frequently spoken of in nuBSG was in fact Count Iblis. It'd sure fit his M.O.

That's exactly what I thought too. Unfortunately, it was never really discussed as I had hoped it would. I'm pretty sure that "He who should not be named" was also Iblis. Many of us in the BSG world were really chomping at the bit so see him show up. There was even a rumor popping up at the time that it was going to be Sir Roger Moore. I think that would have worked pretty well, actually. Here's a concept pic that someone came up with back then:

Sadly, we'll never know now.

Edit: My mistake, the proper title was actually "The One Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken", and it was in the "Sacred Scrolls" and not the Book of Pythia. Apologies for the earlier errors. Link to Wiki - they say it's just "god".

 

[JD]

I hear what you (and Christopher) are saying, but my point is that I think the writers kind of ran out of time because their ratings weren't doing very well (pretty steady downward trend since the series premiere "33") and they cut a lot of storyline corners leaving far too much to the audience to try to noodle out for themselves. Now, mind you, I'm not interested in being spoon-fed all the answers. Some things can certainly be left up to the imagination, but why not delve deeper in the core mysteries that were the underpinnings of the show from the very beginning? It's like they left all the "naturalistic" stuff totally bare bones and in the open, but the more metaphysical aspects that drove the current and motivations of damn near all the characters were pretty much set aside and not given much in the way of additional fleshing out.

In TOS, we didn't know who/what the Beings of Light really were, but we didn't need to because we had a clear sense that they had a hand in the bigger picture of what was going on in the world. We understood their motivation, especially when we were introduced to "John" (played by Edward Mulhare) who provided us with even more information about their mission and how the Colonials were a part of it. We also had Count Iblis, a creature of immeasurable evil who was likely responsible for the evolution of the original reptilian Cylons into cybernetic creatures (hence the intentional usage of Patrick MacNee's voice in the Imperious Leader), who was clearly not keeping the Colonials' interests at heart. We understood his motivation. There was a clear sense that there was a "grand chess game" being played by these beings on a cosmic/ethereal level, while the Cylons and Colonials were mere pawns in that game. Incidentally - that's one of the more interesting things that happened in Babylon 5, in the war between the Shadows and the Vorlons, with the humans and other younger alien races getting caught in the middle. THAT show did it right. Ultimately, we never really knew what they were, but we were shown enough to get a good idea of what was going on in the bigger picture. TOS BSG started doing this as well and likely would have done more had the network suits not meddled in its production so severely before dying such a premature death. NuBSG started up with promise but then quickly muddied it up and cast many things aside without really giving us a sense of what was going on at the "macro" level. I guess that's my biggest problem with it. It was too "micro". A series of such an epic scope should be more "macro", if that makes any sense.

Oh, well. A new one's coming (hopefully). Let's see what they make of it. Either way, I'm guaranteed to see it, so come what may!

While, I do enjoy the show, and will defend what they did, I do agree that it would have been nice to get clearer answers. I actually feel the same way about Lost too.

 

[Christopher]

I had assumed they were supposed to be Angels, but the Battlestar Wiki just calls them messengers.

Same thing. "Angel" comes from the Greek word angelos, which means "messenger" and is the literal translation of the Hebrew mal'akh in the original text of the Bible. An angel is a messenger of God.

I honestly don't remember this, but if there is a God then it makes sense that their would be a Devil too.

Depends on your theology. The idea of a cosmology defined by opposing divine forces of good and evil is pretty specific to Western religions; I think it basically started with Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism and spread to influence other religious traditions from the Middle East. But our modern conception of the Devil in Christianity is sort of a medieval amalgam of more ambiguous ideas from the Bible.

Of course, Glen Larson intended the original BSG to be sort of a sci-fi take on the Book of Mormon...

 

[Marc]

That's exactly what I thought too. Unfortunately, it was never really discussed as I had hoped it would. I'm pretty sure that "He who should not be named" was also Iblis. Many of us in the BSG world were really chomping at the bit so see him show up. There was even a rumor popping up at the time that it was going to be Sir Roger Moore. I think that would have worked pretty well, actually. Here's a concept pic that someone came up with back then:

Sadly, we'll never know now.

Edit: My mistake, the proper title was actually "The One Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken", and it was in the "Sacred Scrolls" and not the Book of Pythia. Apologies for the earlier errors. Link to Wiki - they say it's just "god".

Roger Moore as count ibilis?

I for one am glad he didn't.

McNee had the charisma and the voice that allowed him to menacing and yet oh so charming.

Moore has nothing.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Jeremy Irons would have made one hell (pun intended) of a nu-Iblis.

 

[ATimson]

In the original, triad was a basketball-like game and pyramid a card game; they reversed that in the reboot for some reason.

From the commentaries, I believe that was a mistake but by the time they realized it was too late to fix it, so they just ran with it.

 

[RandyS]

I wouldn't mind another BSG. I started watching the original a while ago, and I have to say - I was expecting total cringe from it, but it's actually really good & interesting.

The scifi remake is frustrating, because it seems like a show I would really like, but I actually do get motion sickness from watching it, so i can only watch a little of it here & there. So it's hard to get invested.

For a movie I wouldn't mind a mixture of the old-school melodrama & new age grit.

Ah, the "Shaky cam"? Yeah, I wasn't a fan of that either.But that wasn't New Galactica's fault. The first time I saw that was in 1993 when NYPD Blue came out. I love cop shows almost as much as sci-fi, and really wanted to like that series, but the shaky cam made it hard to follow.

Interestingly, Mary McDonnell (Laura) also indicated she hated that.

 

[Destructor]

"God" was God, period, and the messengers were angels. Starbuck was some similar kind of supernatural manifestation. The show was telling us that all along, that the religious and mystical elements were real, but since it was cast in a "naturalistic" space-opera framework, that was hard for a lot of us to accept. I know I kept waiting for some rational explanation for it all, and it wasn't until the finale that I realized, hey, this was actually a magic-realist fantasy all along.

Huh? That's not how I interpreted the end of Galactica *at all*. "All of this has happened before and all of this has happened again." The impression I was left with is that the Galactica universe is in an endless loop, in which man (parent) creates machine (child), machine rebels, becomes man (grows up), repeats cycle (rebirth). In the previous cycle five or more man/machines managed to transcend their physical form and jump to the next cycle in an attempt to put a stop to the endless repetition of war (the question of whether they succeeded or not is left open- it's literally left 'up to us', us being contemporary humans). They were given this ability by the machines from the a cycle or cycles BEFORE the previous one (since the cycle is endless, it may have happened countless times). These man-machines essentially left their physical forms to become messengers (angels) for the entities that taught them how to ascend (to them: God. From a third-person perspective: The previous entities in the cycle), their purpose being to break the cycle either the next time around, or at the very least teach the machines of the next cycle how to ascend (and thus become Gods themselves) so they could have another attempt to break the cycle the next time around.

Completely understand if people didn't come away with this reading, but sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic and so on...

 

[Commander Richard]

Ron Moore wanted to include the Ship of Lights in season 4 to explain Starbuck's return but nixed the idea. Then when it came time to write the finale, he came up with an idea while in the shower... "It's about the characters, stupid!" And you saw the result. Whatever happened then became a mystery to both the characters and the audience. Moore also mentioned in an interview that he wanted to leave people with the impression that there's "something" at work out there.

Shortly after the finale, a 4-part comic series called The Final Five came out. It was written by a BSG staff member and was endorsed by Jane Espenson in an interview. In the story, Pythia is killed and comes back piloting a ship just as Starbuck did. The explanation given was that Pythia did in fact die and an angel who likes to work in the flesh rather than appear as a "head character" took her place and resumed her life to carry out her mission/life purpose. If you want to treat the comic as valid then you can say that his is what happened to Starbuck. The comic also established the head characters/angels as the the Ship of Lights people.

 

[Christopher]

Huh? That's not how I interpreted the end of Galactica *at all*. "All of this has happened before and all of this has happened again." The impression I was left with is that the Galactica universe is in an endless loop, in which man (parent) creates machine (child), machine rebels, becomes man (grows up), repeats cycle (rebirth).

Well, yes, that's self-evident, but there was also plenty of evidence that it was guided by supernatural forces -- the "angels," the prophecies that consistently came true, etc. The very idea of a cyclical history requires some force of "destiny" to be operating, which is a pretty darn metaphysical concept.

These man-machines essentially left their physical forms to become messengers (angels) for the entities that taught them how to ascend (to them: God.

That was not claimed within the show itself, as far as I recall. I think that's your own extrapolation. In the show, there was never any refutation of the supernatural nature of the messengers. They claimed to be angels of God, and the events of the show never disproved that or provided a scientific explanation for it. Any attempt to explain things away with science (for instance, the idea that Baltar had a chip in his head projecting Head Six) was debunked. Every mystical vision or prophecy or resurrection that was scoffed at by skeptical characters turned out to be the genuine article. Just like everything else about Moore-BSG, this was the deliberate opposite of Star Trek's approach. In ST, everything seemingly supernatural could be explained in terms of science or highly evolved life forms. Here, everything seemingly supernatural defied efforts to prove it otherwise and ultimately had to be taken on exactly the terms that were presented.

As I said, it wasn't until the finale that I realized it was never meant to be science fiction, that all the mystical stuff was meant to be real all along -- and it wasn't until I realized this that the show finally made sense to me. I'd been frustrated by the lack of a coherent scientific explanation for all the mystical hoodoo, but that was because I was mistakenly expecting one. Realizing that the show had been a work of magical realism all along made it work better for me.

 

[Commander Richard]

I was expecting an explanation too but the ending worked for me.