God gave them all the visions they needed to find the destroyed Earth, then they found our Earth because God put a song in Starbuck's head.
RDM's Battlestar Galactica
- Thread starter TopperHenly
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Logically, the latter part of the 3rd season and the 4th didn't work but as a fan of the series I was more forgiving and it was fun explaining these inconsistencies on internet forums with like-minded fans and coming up with theories but I can understand the WTF response that non-fans get over these plot lines. I haven't seen the series for a number of years. I've got a few more other series to watch including episodes of the TNG before I go back at it. Maybe in a few years, I'll come to this topic or another one and come up with some ideas to explain this logical flaw.
That's not "they were predetermined", that's "they were given clues or hints". They had to figure those things out. They had to make a lot of choices along the way. Any of those choices could have gone bad, and some did. Surely you wouldn't argue that Dee was destined to commit suicide, or that D'Anna was destined to stay behind on Destroyed Earth? Those weren't predetermined-anything, they were choices made out of despair.
Pity we never got the chance to see Marine officers.
Actually there was one, but he was in civilian garb. We never got to see what normal Marine uniforms looked like, as all the Marines we saw on active duty were in either armor or fatigues.
I’m wondering if that was their regular uniform all along. I got the impression only the “naval” folks had formalized uniforms.
There was also another Marine officer in the fourth season, though he was wearing tactical gear as well. In the first season, I thought the brown uniform that we saw Sgt. Hadrian (what that her name? The one conducting the inquiry) wearing was supposed be what Marines wore when they weren't in their tactical gear. The rest of the series didn't really follow through with that and every other Marine we see is always wearing tactical gear when on duty, even in situations where they shouldn't, like the ones being interviewed for D'Anna's documentary.
The brown uniforms, IIRC, were initially supposed to be Warrant Officers. I did up a chart on BSG rank devices one time. There was some confusion and inconsistency on their use, particularly when they went and gave one of the Warrant Officer devices to Fisk when he was a Lt. Colonel in “Razor”, I think, before his promotion to Colonel and Cain’s XO. Originally I don’t think there was ever supposed to be a Lt. Colonel, but they needed one for that episode and they just repurposed a lesser-used WO device and assumed nobody would notice the difference (I did). In any case, here’s the chart I drew up ages ago:
Yes, Hadrian was referred to as “Sergeant” but it looked like she was wearing a PO1 grade on a tan uniform. One of the many inconsistencies in the show, mixing naval and marine/army grades.
Lower-end enlisted rank devices were all over the place and I had quite a difficult experience putting those together. The officers were pretty easy.
I never tried to do a chart for TOS ranks, as they were completely unintelligible.
Lower-end enlisted rank devices were all over the place and I had quite a difficult experience putting those together. The officers were pretty easy.
I never tried to do a chart for TOS ranks, as they were completely unintelligible.
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But that is real life. How much agency do we have and how much is determined by biology/circumstance in our own lives? Many of us live entire days on autopilot. Much of what we are able to do with out lives is determined by circumstances of birth. I know that is not what most people want to hear but it is the uncomfortable truth of human existence.
Relating to the show itself, the characters had their own agency and their own stories--within the "this has all happened before and will again" story--even the Starbuck/Angel character had to struggle to reach her conclusion. She was not given all the answers up front.
In religious terms this is very similar to the life of Christ in Kazantzaki's novel--Christ had a destiny that had to be fulfilled but in order to fulfill that destiny he had to live a life of free will without knowing what God had in store for him.
Moore is drawing on a much larger literary and philosophical tradition in the series itself.
It may not have ended the way we expected, and the details of the "they have a plan" BS might have been a lie, but the overall thematic structure is intact from beginning to end.
That's odd. I wonder why they didn't just make Fisk a Major in Razor?
And looking over the various rank insignia, I remember a complaint made while the show was in production which I definitely see there in that too many of the insignia look nearly identical. Which is kind of odd, in a military setting you'd want everyone to be able to clearly see whether or not someone outranked them. Although I guess in a tactical situation, it helps if the enemy can't figure out who the higher ranked personnel are. Then again, I imagine a Cylon Centurion could just zoom in from a distance and figure it out.
There's a lot of discussion to be had about the nature of free will. But if my biology determines my actions, the result is still determined by the content of those actions and everybody else's actions. If I play a game of chess, my move may be determined by my biology, but the outcome is determined by my move.
In BSG, the moves didn't matter, the outcome was the same no matter what the characters did.
Exactly. Sci fi has always had problems with easily recognizable rank devices. While I love the monster maroons of the TWOK era, personally, many of them are also quite small and difficult to discern at a distance, especially the flag officers, Rear Admiral on up.
As you said, IRL, military personnel need to know who salutes first as they approach each other from a distance. That’s why the shapes and colors of the devices, particularly at the officer level, are easy to see. With the BSG devices, it’s damn near impossible. As for combat situations, I recall that saluting in the field was forbidden, lest a sniper happened to catch the act and shoot the superior officer being saluted. I think this was especially true during Vietnam (the VC and NVA threw all convention out the window during the persecution of that war), but it’s possible that directive has been around since WWII. Can’t recall that one clearly. I don’t know if it’s carried on into the 21st century sandbox wars, but modern devices are all subdued now on the BDU’s, black and brown instead of silver and gold.
I'm not sure a Cylon would care.
It would see a human, it would kill a human and that's all that would matter.
Because BSG as a property is fundamentally grounded in Mormon theology and doctrine, I'm going to share how I think RDM's take on the series fits into said theology and doctrine.
Without being preachy, Mormon doctrine teaches that all people were created in the image of God and that all people will be saved through Christ and live on after death, but that an individual's choices determine the degree to which that salvation and eternal existence applies to them.
Taking this concept into the context of nuBSG, a being perceived as God set out to at least temporarily save human and Cylon kind from a perpetual cycle of death and destruction by leading them to a new world, but they could have at any point kept perpetuating that cycle indefinitely or otherwise disrupted or rejected the 'salvation of Earth' through their own individual choices.
In other words, at no point was the specific fate of human and Cylon kind as depicted in the series finale absolutely predetermined. Salvation was the ultimate positive end-goal, but the form in which it manifested itself could and was impacted by individual choice and agency throughout the journey away from the Colonies and towards Earth.
Without being preachy, Mormon doctrine teaches that all people were created in the image of God and that all people will be saved through Christ and live on after death, but that an individual's choices determine the degree to which that salvation and eternal existence applies to them.
Taking this concept into the context of nuBSG, a being perceived as God set out to at least temporarily save human and Cylon kind from a perpetual cycle of death and destruction by leading them to a new world, but they could have at any point kept perpetuating that cycle indefinitely or otherwise disrupted or rejected the 'salvation of Earth' through their own individual choices.
In other words, at no point was the specific fate of human and Cylon kind as depicted in the series finale absolutely predetermined. Salvation was the ultimate positive end-goal, but the form in which it manifested itself could and was impacted by individual choice and agency throughout the journey away from the Colonies and towards Earth.
When I was in the Army, stationed in Germany, there was an Armor (tank) unit stationed down the road from my unit. The uniform at the time had us wearing unit insignia on the front of our caps. The unit insignia for this tank battalion, from a distance, looked a whole hell of a lot like a captain's (O-3) rank insignia. I ended up saluting a lot of poor confused enlisted tank crewmen those two years.
What compounds the situation even further is that IIRC, there were concept designs which showed the ranks being displayed on shoulder epaulets, at least for the officers, which would have made a lot more sense.
It's odd, so much of BSG was Ron Moore raging against the established tropes of sci-fi, particularly televised sci-fi, but when it comes to the uniforms and rank devices, BSG's wasn't much different compared to other sci-fi shows of the 1990s or 2000s.
Yeah, I think it still goes on. It's also why modern uniforms worn in the field are so similar with no distinction between officer and enlisted, and nothing besides simple collar insignia to distinguish between different ranks.
I don't know why they'd do that...Sgt. Hadrian's uniform sure looked like simple fatigues, and I highly doubt that's what they'd always wear when not in armor. The Colonial Navy doesn't work like that, why would the Marines?
Me, I just think they simply didn't bother to make a Marine officer's uniform since there's little chance that they'd appear in situations where they wouldn't wear armor. We see Fleet officers all the time, at times where it's normal that they'd wear regular duty uniforms.
Kind of like ST VI, when Colonel West (a Starfleet Marine) wore the same uniform everyone else wore: there's no chance we'd see him again, and the SFMC is unlikely to turn up in a future episode or film (although I'd love it if they did) so why make a uniform that would never again be used?
Honestly I don’t think Hadrian was a Marine, despite the rank designation was more Army/Marine based than Navy. According to the Battlestar Wiki, her alternate title was “Master-at-Arms”, and many photos out there show her wearing a “Security” arm band. She appeared to be more the chief of security/generic military police, rather than representing a particular branch of service.
In the end, I don’t believe much thought was put into these roles when the names and titles were put together. They were always more focused on telling the story than nuts and bolts of this level of minutiae. For this reason is why we never really knew how the FTL “spinners” worked for example, along with other technical concepts that weren’t majorly tied to the plot.
Staying on the subject of the military side, the MACO's were equipped for military operations but when in for instance in DS9, Starfleet personnel were involved in military operations as well as going into warzones but didn't have any body armour. Starfleet didn't want to be associated as a military organisation but considering armour has been part of martial philosophy since the dawn of time, it didn't make sense that Starfleet personal not to have them?
I first watched nuBSG several years after the initial run, and became so obsessed with it that I burned through the entire series in a few weeks. I found it to be quite depressing, as the “survivor count” in the titles would drop with each passing episode. In normal times, I would have viewed people like Adama and Roslin as honorable and well intentioned, but I saw these characters driven to take less-than-honorable actions out of sheer desperation.
I found it chilling the suggestion that we, being the descendants of the Colonials, are perhaps making the very same mistakes as they did in our pursuit of robotics and AI, that we will eventually create our own “Cylons” that will end up destroying us. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
I found it chilling the suggestion that we, being the descendants of the Colonials, are perhaps making the very same mistakes as they did in our pursuit of robotics and AI, that we will eventually create our own “Cylons” that will end up destroying us. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
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Just watched a British show called Humans on Amazon, that dealt with this very notion. 3 seasons, but cancelled early, unfortunately. It really delved into the psychological effects of AI on humans and what might happen if the AI’s started becoming self-aware and the moral implications of such an evolution. It was quite a believable scenario, how they portrayed it - and, yeah, it got serious dark. Really wish it continued.
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