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Battlestar Galactica getting rebooted (again) for NBS's streaming service

One way to look at it is the way director Michael Rymer prefers, as more of an allegory, perhaps a part of the “universal translation” to bring the drama closer to the audience, but it’s not the official word. I prefer to speculate within the canon: OK, so if they did arrive 150,000 years ago, nobody survived long enough to influence anything. It’s our doing, and the Colonial story begins when our descendants settle Kobol.



The first season made it clear that the show would very much explore religion, but that’s different from constructing your story so that God and angels (or are they? “God” doesn’t like to be called that) become responsible for everything from leading the Colonials to one Earth and then another, to presumably somehow ensuring that the secret of the business suit is preserved throughout millennia. Religion and pseudoscience can’t be applied towards a convenient handwave in story construction. “Oh, we need to end now… well, what did Larson start with, ‘Life here began out there?’ So we’ll stick with that and the rest, er, somehow it filters through the millennia? Or maybe God did it?”
Our society wasn't directly influenced by the Colonials society, it's just that all of the same stuff comes back around in each cycle. There is no direct connection between modern suits and the suits the Colonials wore, it's just that suits are part of the cycle that has come back around to us now.
 
The original BSG was 100% rooted in theological concepts and stories retold through a Science Fiction lens, so to expect any subsequent interpretation or iteration of it to be devoid of relious themes is just strange.

Who said “devoid of religious themes”? I’m just arguing that nBSG can live without deus-ex-machina writing and pseudoscience.

Our society wasn't directly influenced by the Colonials society, it's just that all of the same stuff comes back around in each cycle. There is no direct connection between modern suits and the suits the Colonials wore, it's just that suits are part of the cycle that has come back around to us now.

But who or what controls the cycles reinventing suits and ties?
 
Nobody controls it, it's just the way the universe is.
Or maybe God did it.
The whole point of the last scene of the finale was showing that we were the next phase of the cycle, and that we were nearing the point where we are going to invent our Cyclons, who are going to wipe us out and start things all over again.
 
But Head Six was also possibly a chip in Baltar’s head. Even when no chip could be found, the show never went as far as saying she’s absolutely an angel.
Then why does Caprica Six have a Head Baltar that stays with her after she dies and downloads into new bodies? Do the bodies she downloads into conveniently have chips in their brains, and only those ones?
Some of that needs to be broken up into more revelations, which is where a new miniseries could come in.
Whatever else this new BSG will be, it most certainly will not be rationalizing Moore's series into hard science.
 
If Glen A. Larsen had thought he could get away with it, "God did it" would have absolutely been a transparent narrative theme of the original BSG because of his LDS background.
 
Then why does Caprica Six have a Head Baltar that stays with her after she dies and downloads into new bodies? Do the bodies she downloads into conveniently have chips in their brains, and only those ones?

Whatever else this new BSG will be, it most certainly will not be rationalizing Moore's series into hard science.

The show explicitly questions the chip, but the conclusion isn’t “no chip, therefore God” either. Other interpretations are possible within the canon, and RDM isn’t telling the viewer, “Believe.”
 
I am a fan of the original 1978 -1980 BSG. I watched Moore's 2003-2009 BSG and I will be interested to see what they do with this new BSG 2020 too.
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So where does this leave Universal's plan for a new series of movies? I seem to recall an announcement earlier this year or late last year about it.
 
Hasn't it been a decade?
Yep and only 8 years separated Batman & Robin from Batman Begins and - I don't know if this counts - 4 years between Die Another Day & Casino Royale. By comparison the BSG people are positively restrained. Plus I'm assuming the tweet from the person who's behind it implies to me it'll be a spin off rather than a reboot.
 
If Moore's BSG took place mostly in the distant past, then maybe Esmail's will take place in the distant future and continue the idea of "all this has happened before." Especially with "All Along the Watchtower" transcending time and space...
:hugegrin:
 
I find the "clarifying" statement to actually make things far more unclear. Before, I thought they were making, well, Battlestar Galactica. Last group of human survivors, evil robots, lost planet Earth, younger actors, steadier cameras, and rather than saying they'll figure out a plan as they go, they'll say they have everything planned out in advance, and then blatantly change course twice a season and retcon all their established lore, like Discovery.

Now I don't know what the hell it is. A remake of BSG, but not of nuBSG? A new story set in the nuBSG universe?

All I know is, they're not going to use either of my ideas, which are a) the Na'vi from Avatar are the descendants of the Rebel Centurions using humanoid Cylon technology crossed with the native wildlife to produce bespoke flesh bodies so they wouldn't feel obligated to imitate human society again, and b) that the Colonial survivors settling on Earth 2 did not actually become immediately lost to history, and were the founders of the ancient human star-empire from the backstory of the Halo video games, which I keep in my back pocket to shut people up who complain about how unthinkable wanting to rough it is after spending literally four years in an airplane, and that it's ridiculous that suits and ties and english existed 150,000 years ago (and that we must interpret those absolutely literally), since it's a plot point that Ancient Humanity is slowly recreating itself though contemporary Humanity thanks to deep-rooted alien brainwashing. How's that for some damn science fiction?

I'm sticking with my suspicion that the "Cylon God" spoken of in nuBSG is actually Count Iblis.

You know, if you open your mind the teeniest bit, the concept of God is, by definition, a powerful transdimensional space alien, so I don't get this impulse that it's more believable as science fiction if we specify that it's a really cheesy one who is also cartoonishly evil. There's also the confusing implications of naming the entity whose hints averted the total end of human civilization at least twice, and overtly deposited mankind in the literal Garden of Eden at least once to be reborn as a people, as being cheesy space-Satan. Kinda getting into some weird territory there. Is Satan the good guy, and God (who still exists by implication) the bad guy? Is humanity's mere existence utterly evil and our continued survival is an affront to all that is good in the universe?

But who or what controls the cycles reinventing suits and ties?

Who "controls the cycles"? What kind of question is that? Are you going to ask me to draw a hydrodynamic diagram to explain why sharks and dolphins are similarly shaped, sized, and colored despite being totally unrelated? Things look like things for reasons. Sometimes those reasons apply in different situations and environments. Sometimes that makes things look like other things. Sometimes things happen in movies for dramatic, figurative, or metaphorical effect. There isn't actually a tiny spotlight on the bridge of the Enterprise that blasts right into Captain Kirk's eyes, activated by the power of his thoughts concentrating on what the Romulan Commander will do next.

I'm having flashbacks to the BSG78 die-hard who hate-watched every episode of nuBSG and cried and rent his garments every time something remotely contemporary showed up. He was overjoyed that the bucket Starbuck tried to drown Leoban in was painted metallic gray and had a bunch of lumps on it so it looked futuristic, rather than just being a simple off-white cylinder (even though, in all likelihood, they still just bought it from Ikea).

Costuming, as with anything else, reveals character. The point of the people of the Colonies wearing contemporary clothes, having dogs and cats, eating apples, was to establish them as relatable in the minds of the audience. That's it. It tells you these are human beings in a civilization like the one you live in, not space aliens or super-evolved future-people, and so you can carry some amount of your preconceptions with you. That's it. If you don't like the "television universal translator" idea that what we see isn't a literal extrapolation of a space-faring society of the distant past, there's also the concept of cycles of time woven into the show, suggesting there's a deeper, unknowable level of reality that we are bonded to but cannot comprehend, that on a larger scale than we can imagine, we are woven into the inescapable network of mutuality. That life and death and love and art and revenge and forgiveness bind together the very stars themselves, that the human experience is transcendent, and not just a bunch of monkeys overthinking how to get the juiciest fruit.

It is not to establish that there's an unbroken chain-of-custody between the J.Crew where they bought Apollo's blue suit in 2007 and the planet Caprica. That's absurd.

Think about what you're proposing here. You're saying that, because lapels and neckties are such a freakishly unique evolution of body-coverings, you require a story where, at some point in the near future before they go out of fashion, the people of Earth must travel to the far side of the galaxy, colonize a planet, have the civilization there develop for no less than two thousand years, possibly as many as eighteen, undergoes an apocalyptic cataclysm, then the survivors colonize another group of planets, spend another two thousand years of civilization, and at the end of all that, they have never once deviated from 2000s-era men's fashions, and the only alteration in the english language has been a vowel shift and an added consonant in the word "fuck." Also, at some point, time travel, which no one notices having happened. This, at your request, is plausible hard science fiction.
 
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Loved Moore's nuBSG. It sounds like this one might be interesting, given that it's at least somewhat derived from that instead of the 70s space disco show.

And no version of BSG has approached being hard sf for more than one minute. There's absolutely no reason to start that stuff now.

*Oddly enough, one scene in the Galactica 1980 pilot.
 
After seeing Mr. Robot and hearing Sam Esmail on a podcast talking about TV and movies, I'll give anything he does a try.
 
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