Is Religion Killing Good Sci-Fi Shows? [minimal politics]

[JirinPanthosa]

I don't know if BSG is too old to need to spoiler tag, but I think Starbuck's role in season four and the opera house reveal were incredibly weak, and it all literally ended up as a 'God did everything'.

Well, as I said earlier (and years ago) in the thread, the writers were giving us evidence of supernatural intervention as far back as the first chamalla prophecies in season 1 and the revelation in season 2 that Baltar's Head Six was not created by an impant chip (which was when she revealed that she was an angel). I resisted accepting those because I still wanted there to be a rational explanation, but the signs were there all along. Once I saw the finale and it became clear that there was no secular explanation, I finally admitted that it had been a magic-realist space opera all along.

Yeah, but that revelation kind of undermines the dark survivalist cultural criticism that made the first 2.2 seasons exciting. And there's a big difference between characters being influenced in one direction by God and characters being led by the hand.

 

[Christopher]

Yeah, but that revelation kind of undermines the dark survivalist cultural criticism that made the first 2.2 seasons exciting. And there's a big difference between characters being influenced in one direction by God and characters being led by the hand.

Well, whether you like or dislike the way a story is told is up to you. I'm just pointing out that the evidence of divine intervention was seeded from the first season onward, rather than being some sudden retcon at the end. It was ambiguous, but it was always there.

And really, one should've expected nothing less, given that the original BSG was a sci-fi riff on the Book of Mormon and had plenty of supernatural elements, even if it handwaved them as arbitrarily advanced aliens to keep the network censors at bay. They had Patrick Macnee essentially play Satan and revealed that he was responsible for programming the Cylons. There was even an episode where Edward Mulhare played an "angel" whom only Apollo could see or hear and who guided him with cryptic advice, a direct antecedent to Angel Six and Angel Baltar.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

It wasn't a retcon, it was just weak storytelling. And from experience you would have expected the direct intervention of literal religion to stay ambiguous.

 

[Christopher]

And from experience you would have expected the direct intervention of literal religion to stay ambiguous.

And how well would we remember the series if it had done nothing more than conforming to past precedent and expectations? Just giving audiences what they expect is the path to forgettable mediocrity.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

And from experience you would have expected the direct intervention of literal religion to stay ambiguous.

And how well would we remember the series if it had done nothing more than conforming to past precedent and expectations? Just giving audiences what they expect is the path to forgettable mediocrity.

So is taking away the characters' agency and making it very clear that the supernatural entities always had a firm hold on the nape of everyone's neck.

Nothing else in the series gave the audience what they expected. Nobody expected a Nazi Occupation allegory to start the third season, but that was a well told storyline. Defying expectations is only a good thing if you do it in an interesting direction. Just like, it would defy expectations if everybody suddenly started break dancing in the middle of the final battle, but that doesn't mean it would be good.

 

[Christopher]

So is taking away the characters' agency and making it very clear that the supernatural entities always had a firm hold on the nape of everyone's neck.

Was that really a change, though? The whole "All this has happened before" line was there nearly from the beginning.

Besides, if anything, I'd say the BSG characters absolutely did have agency. After all, in every other iteration of the cycle, humans and Cylons had just continued to fight and destroy each other and perpetuate the loop. This was the first time that humans and Cylons came together to create something new, the first time the cycle was changed. And it was because of these characters' agency and choices, because Helo and Sharon fell in love, because Caprica Six had a crisis of conscience, and because of the other personal choices that let this generation of humans and Cylons transcend the cycle that had trapped all the previous ones and thereby avoid extinction for the first time ever. I don't see how that can be interpreted as a loss of agency.

Predestination doesn't automatically mean that people have no power to choose. To borrow an analogy from a recent Librarians episode, think of it like playing a computer game. The programming of the game gives you a predetermined set of situations and decisions that you have to face, but what's not predetermined is how you respond to them. If it's a hard enough game, then players may face the same challenge over and over again in replays of the game and make the same mistakes and failures each time -- but if a player is smart enough or good enough or lucky enough to see the option the others missed, then they can beat the challenge and move to the next level of the game. So all this has happened before and will happen again, but that doesn't mean you can't change its outcome.

 

[RoJoHen]

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again...until you figure out how to win.

I like that video game analogy. If you die, you restart at your last checkpoint.

 

[The Old Mixer]

That a higher power was influencing the final outcome doesn't change the very real trials that the characters went through. BSG was about the journey, not the destination.