Moore's Galactica, what exactly was number 6?

[Reverend]

And Lost actually did answer 95% of its mysteries. Just they never had anyone step out from behind a big curtain, cackle evilly and say “Haha I was controlling everything the whole time!” so inattentive viewers missed most of them.

I think my main problem with the "mystery" side of 'Lost' wasn't so much a lack of explanation as it was an over abundance of extraneous nonsense, which while they were mostly "explained", they didn't in and of themselves amount to anything. Mostly just put there to take the audience around to houses and spin things out for as long as possible. By the end, even if I could keep it all straight in my head, I no longer cared enough to try. Also the plughole of evil was just so utterly lame, whether or not it's explained is besides the point. I mean...it's a plughole...of DOOM...

Lost and nuBSG were both poorly constructed mysteries, yet they each found their own unique ways to half-arse the execution too.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

PMFJI but...

is there any truth to the rumor that "Revelations" was originally supposed to be the series ending?

Spoiler

with the crew stuck on ruined, nuked "Earth"

Given the general tone of the show, I can't say that surprises me.

 

[The Wormhole]

PMFJI but...

is there any truth to the rumor that "Revelations" was originally supposed to be the series ending?

Spoiler

with the crew stuck on ruined, nuked "Earth"

Given the general tone of the show, I can't say that surprises me.

Sort of. At the time, that was the last episode filmed before they had to shut down due to the 2008 Writer's Strike and SyFy told Ron Moore that if the Strike went on for longer than a certain amount of time, they were just going to pull the plug and that would have to serve as the series finale. Fortunately, the Strike didn't go on that long, and they were able to resume production and do their own ending.

 

[Reverend]

I don't know, that feels like a much more honest ending than what we got...

 

[Dark Gilligan]

The ending was quite honest, actually. Head Six said from the very beginning that she was an angel of God. That claim continued through the entire run of the show, and in the end it turned out to be correct. Angel after all means "messenger". Even Caprica Six spoke of her faith in God in the very first episode. As for Starbuck, she was linked to the angel Aurora (destined to lead mankind home) as early as season 1. God, or the Cylon God, was pulling strings from beginning to end. That's consistent storytelling.

Here's the thing. God can't logically be explained. Even the scriptures acknowledge this. The finite human mind cannot truly comprehend that which is infinite. Faith is believing in something that can't be seen. As such, religious faith is completely subjective. It does not intersect with objective reason at any level, because nothing in scripture can be objectively proven. Anyone expecting a rational explanation for why this is so will be sorely disappointed, because none exists. Never did.

Moore didn't explain God, or the Cylon God, or whatever "it" was that didn't like being called God. That doesn't mean he was lazy. His story acknowledged that God simply is, be it a human belief or a Cylon one, and that message (as conveyed by the "messengers") remained consistent throughout.

 

[David cgc]

Sort of. At the time, that was the last episode filmed before they had to shut down due to the 2008 Writer's Strike and SyFy told Ron Moore that if the Strike went on for longer than a certain amount of time, they were just going to pull the plug and that would have to serve as the series finale. Fortunately, the Strike didn't go on that long, and they were able to resume production and do their own ending.

Well, not quite the last episode filmed. From what I understand, they shot all the groundside scenes for "Sometimes a Great Notion" before the writer's strike (at the same time they did the one closing shot in "Revelations"), but all the stuff in the studio after they came back. I expect they shot at least one alternate version of a scene while they were on location, just in case the delay changed their plans, since before the writer's strike, it was expected that Lucy Lawless was going to be recurring in the second half of season 4, but I guess her availability changed, leading to D'anna's somewhat anticlimactic decision to sit quietly and wait to starve rather than continue to put up with the tiresome rigamarole of not being dead.

Likewise, for reasons I'm about to elaborate on, I am morally certain that if they were suddenly, conclusively cancelled before "Revelations" broadcast, and Ron Moore didn't decide to utterly destroy the story he'd been telling out of overwhelming spite, they would've trimmed the last minute from the episode and just left it ambiguous what they found when they got to Earth.

I don't know, that feels like a much more honest ending than what we got...

I disagree. The blatant optimism and unreserved sentimentality of the endings of (checks episode list) the miniseries, 33, Water, You Can't Go Home Again, The Hand of God, Home (Part II), Flight of the Phoenix, Resurrection Ship (Part 2), Scar, Downloaded, Exodus (Part 2), The Passage, A Day in the Life, Faith, Sine Qua Non, and The Hub, among others, established a clear dramatic and thematic through-line that the characters would ultimately succeed in their quest despite overwhelming adversity, and that overwhelming adversity would not, in fact, win out.

Stories are machines. They are not just a bunch of stuff that happened, they are constructed on a logic and framework which provides the audience with tools to understand and contextualize the events in their own lives rather than being overwhelmed by the sheer random chaos of an all-but-infinite universe and the conflicting actions and motivations of hundreds of other humans in your social sphere, each of which has their own complex internal life. In a thousand ways, big and small, Battlestar Galactica tipped its hand from night one of the miniseries that this is a story where the heroes make it. I cannot for the life of me understand anyone who watched the show and thought for one minute it was going in any direction other than the promised land. The only thing more baffling was the people who were sure the humans were going to intentionally and overtly counter-genocide the Cylons with no survivors.

 

[JD]

I don't see why this matters narratively based on the overall context of how the story plays out.

Also, God in the BSG universe is briefly referred to as She by 'Head!Baltar'.

It's just annoying when we have something that ends up being a big factor in how the story plays out, but it's the whole time it's just a vague thing referred to offscreen.
And just blowing it off as being God doesn't really work for me, since shows like Supernatural and now Lucifer have brought God in as an onscreen character once he started to play an active role in the story, and in Supernatural's case explored his motivations and history, . We've only seen God in once quick scene in Lucifer so far, but I have a feeling we'll probably at least get some exploration of him as a character.

Yes.

It's just another example of Ron Moore being unable to write an ending. He's always sucked at it. But then again NuBSG was full of stuff that ultimately had disappointing answers or just went nowhere to begin with.

LOST got away with it because ultimately what made the show interesting wasn't the plot and mystery. We all realized that stuff was nonsense. What made the show worth watching was that the characters had more thought put into them and their backstories than your usual bunch of TV characters. We came for the mystery, stayed for the characters.

NuBSG didn't have that.

This is pretty close to how I feel about this stuff.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I cannot for the life of me understand anyone who watched the show and thought for one minute it was going in any direction other than the promised land.

Oh, I had no doubt that they would eventually find Earth. The question is, what condition would it be in when they got there.

And if "Revelations" had, in fact, been the ending, you can bet that I'm not the only one who would have just shrugged and said "Figures."

 

[137th Gebirg]

^^^ Yep. Would have been nothing more than one final kick in the junk for these poor tortured people. For all its faults, I'm glad they finally found "our" Earth and that they were able to build some kind of meaningful ending in a New Eden, instead of ending it in a nuclear wasteland, which was likely uninhabitable long-term.

 

[The Wormhole]

And if "Revelations" had, in fact, been the ending, you can bet that I'm not the only one who would have just shrugged and said "Figures."

Well, that pretty much was the reaction many of us had when Revelations aired anyway and we were thinking that was Earth, as in Our Earth.

 

[137th Gebirg]

I remember people were trying to do a visual analysis on the ruined bridge and distant cityscape to find an our-Earth equivalent. I think someone may have narrowed it down to one of the cities in Australia. I suspect most of it was just a matte painting of random wrecked buildings.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I think my main problem with the "mystery" side of 'Lost' wasn't so much a lack of explanation as it was an over abundance of extraneous nonsense, which while they were mostly "explained", they didn't in and of themselves amount to anything. Mostly just put there to take the audience around to houses and spin things out for as long as possible. By the end, even if I could keep it all straight in my head, I no longer cared enough to try. Also the plughole of evil was just so utterly lame, whether or not it's explained is besides the point. I mean...it's a plughole...of DOOM...

Lost and nuBSG were both poorly constructed mysteries, yet they each found their own unique ways to half-arse the execution too.

I agree the 'Plughole' explanation was weak. And I didn't like the flash sideways. But the whole idea of Jacob staging the whole thing to find a replacement and bringing people to the island to test them because they needed to decide for themselves, and the whole conversion of Jack from skeptic to believer I thought was very well done.

I've found Lost much more rewatchable than Battlestar Galactica after the fact, even if I sometimes don't finish season 6.

Lost season 6 being bad didn't drag down the quality of seasons 1-5 nearly as much as Galactica season 4 being bad did, in my opinion.

 

[Reverend]

I agree the 'Plughole' explanation was weak. And I didn't like the flash sideways. But the whole idea of Jacob staging the whole thing to find a replacement and bringing people to the island to test them because they needed to decide for themselves, and the whole conversion of Jack from skeptic to believer I thought was very well done.

I've found Lost much more rewatchable than Battlestar Galactica after the fact, even if I sometimes don't finish season 6.

Lost season 6 being bad didn't drag down the quality of seasons 1-5 nearly as much as Galactica season 4 being bad did, in my opinion.

Read into it what you will, but for me; while I have attempted to rewatch nuBSG once or twice over the years (interest usually petering out some time in season 3), I've never felt even remotely inclined to rewatch 'Lost'.
The unfolding "mythology" of the show is about as incoherently plotted as it could possibly be, so I see no benefit in going back and experiencing it all again.

Even though it eventually falls apart at the seems, at least with BSG there's enough of a semi thought through sense of world building from the get-go to make the setting compelling. With 'Lost', because I know going in that almost all of the mythology stuff is just a load of empty matryoshka mystery boxes (and the ones that aren't don't resolve, pay off or even come into actual play until WAY down the line) the only thing interesting going on moment-to-moment is the character dynamics. Unfortunately while I liked quite a few of those characters, it's been largely tainted by how sick of most of them I'd become by the end of the show. It makes the whole thing feel like a downward slide.

I think I'm also in a similar headspace when it comes to GoT. For me, when it comes to a piece of serialised, plot heavy, arc dependent entertainment; if you fuck up the ending, it kind of retroactively ruins the whole experience. It's like a Chekhov's Gun of disappointment. I know it's there, I know it'll be used in the third act, and honestly I'd rather not subject myself the mental gymnastics required to pretend it won't happen this time around and enjoy the ride...because it will and I'll like it even less every time.

 

[Thestral]

I think I'm also in a similar headspace when it comes to GoT. For me, when it comes to a piece of serialised, plot heavy, arc dependent entertainment; if you fuck up the ending, it kind of retroactively ruins the whole experience. It's like a Chekhov's Gun of disappointment. I know it's there, I know it'll be used in the third act, and honestly I'd rather not subject myself the mental gymnastics required to pretend it won't happen this time around and enjoy the ride...because it will and I'll like it even less every time.

Same about GoT. I think it's really telling that after an entire year of pandemic, with all the binge watching and mass consumption of media, the Game of Thrones fanbase is just as dead as it was the day after the finale. People just simply... don't care anymore.

 

[DigificWriter]

BSG ended fine.

Game of Thrones ended with the writers absolutely betraying the audience and proving themselves to be bold-faced liars.

 

[IRW Bloodwing]

I always saw Baltar and Head Six as Moore's analogues to the Ship of Light beings.

 

[Anwar]

BSG ended fine.

Game of Thrones ended with the writers absolutely betraying the audience and proving themselves to be bold-faced liars.

GoT was always going to end in an unsatisfying way, it had long become too convoluted.

NuBSG ran out of steam after S2, fell apart in S3 and just barely limped to a lame ending in S4.

 

[137th Gebirg]

I wonder if GRRM will ever finish his books at this point. Everyone knows the ending he approved. True, there will be a lot of backstory and other world-building, but will as many people care?

 

[Noname Given]

"No plan survived first contact with the enemy" would be a good explainat for what happened with the Cylons and their plan.

IMO - I think I'm more app saying for the "Cylon plan" in Ron Moore's version of Battlestar Galactica would be:

"Garbage in, garbage out."

 

[JesterFace]

And the criticism of this is what, exactly?

In a continuing storyline it would make sense to have somekind of an idea among writers how the story will continue instead of someone just writing something that might be cool and create a plothole big enough for an oil tanker. Maybe one writer has a great idea and develops it but later it turns out someone else wrote something that completely ruins the story someone just created. Just writing as as they go along seems lazy.

Then maybe more shows should be written this way, because a lot of shows that were “well planned out” weren’t even close to being as good as NuBSG.

Just because ythewriters of a show don’t know how the show will end from the beginning, doesn’t necessarily mean the show will suck.

Opinions and opinions.... over time I have lost interest in nubsg.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

LOST doesn’t end all too differently from nBSG… we get one episode where the ultimate backstory is laid bare, and then the finale, which doesn’t explain much and relies heavily on religious concepts that could be accepted on faith by viewers so inclined or analyzed by other viewers for non-religious explanations (like, was the island created by future humans with access to time machines?)

However, the LOST puzzle is much, much more complex, especially with all the time periods in later seasons, and a lot of it is managed expertly and explained more gradually than on nBSG. The showrunning style also seems to be a bit more disciplined, as evidenced by this account of what it was like to be a writer on the show in the early days.