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Mister Kingdom
Dec 14, 2005

And the tears that fall
On the city wall
Will fade away
With the rays of morning light

SentinelXS posted:

TLC, History Channel, Tech TV before the fall. All of this has happened before. But the question remains, does all of this have to happen again?

Ovation started out just like A&E with shows about famous pieces of art, ballet, opera, etc and now they just show movies and crappy reality shows. You know what's on it right now? Cool As Ice. Yes, the Vanilla Ice movie.

So, yes, it will all happen again.

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IShallRiseAgain
Sep 12, 2008

Well ain't that precious?

To be fair, the History Channel was terrible before it became the alien conspiracy channel. It focused way too much on World War II. TLC was awesome though, before it became the midget housebuilding network.

Fateo McMurray
Mar 22, 2003

at noon today Discovery was 3 hours of Sons of Guns followed by 13 hours of Auction Kings. I wanted to watch a nature show goddamnit :argh:

Rukus
Mar 13, 2007

Hmph.

LooseChanj posted:

Just in time for cancellation. :( I love that every single press release Siffy makes for B&C contains some form of "we love this show!!! REALLY!!! We plan on giving it every chance!!" Yeah, every chance you can to cancel it. Bleh, gently caress those guys.

I just finished Caprica today due to needing something to watch before Game of Thrones kicks off. That was one hell of a season finale, and the "sneak peak" stuff at the end got me really excited until I realized there wouldn't be a second season. :(

While it may be a pipe dream, I'd totally support a Kickstarter for a second season.

Mad Doctor Cthulhu
Mar 3, 2008

spronk posted:

A new exec comes on board the network, and decides that they are going to revitalize the brand and double subscribers and the only way to do that is to attract new viewers who have no interest in what you are currently showing. Our revenge as TV viewers has been that we have long ago stopped caring what channel shows are on, everything is DVR'd just by show name.

It's pretty suprising things haven't blown up yet, since the fundamental way TV works is pretty much broken now - content is "free" and supported by advertisers who target 18-35 year olds, but that market watches much fewer ads due to DVRs.

I get the feeling things are blowing up but the industry is being quiet about it. Syfy only existed to grab a niche and the cable industry's homogenization in the past decade has just pushed people away. There's nothing special to television anymore outside of the ability to give emergency information. It's all just increasing commercials, baffling censorship, and a lot of filler programming. It's hard to believe that thirty to forty years ago we had people talking about the Glass Teat and now it's been dropped for the Internet or recorded programming that we have total uncut control over viewing. And the media's focus on teenagers for advertising dollars just results in more people turning away to begin with. Television, more or less, has just become infantile. For real drama you have to pay for it, and even then it's cut to poo poo and back.

In a way, I feel this is why Blood & Chrome may not work. From the description, it's being dumbed down in a way television programming doesn't have to be anymore. The paradigm is shifting, and unfortunately for creators the ones in charge are the ones who really have to go to allow change.

IShallRiseAgain
Sep 12, 2008

Well ain't that precious?

The problem with that theory is that reality TV shows are dirt cheap to produce, and the lowest common denominator loves to watch them.

VVV There was genetic experimentation going on during the war.

IShallRiseAgain fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Apr 1, 2012

Adama
May 28, 2009

by Y Kant Ozma Post
Just watched the trailer that was posted- I think it looks fantastic CGI and action-wise... but did anyone else notice what looks like an alien tentacle at 1:19-:20? I thought aliens were a big no-no in the BSG world.

etalian
Mar 20, 2006

IShallRiseAgain posted:

To be fair, the History Channel was terrible before it became the alien conspiracy channel. It focused way too much on World War II. TLC was awesome though, before it became the midget housebuilding network.

But you still had other interesting shows such as Battlefield Detectives that were interesting to watch and also provided a more interesting take than being stuck reading stuffy books.

When you go from showing how the battle Agincourt English victory was not due to the standard school story of the longbow doing everything to Ancient Aliens it's pretty clear something is wrong.

Chairman Capone
Dec 17, 2008

Adama posted:

Just watched the trailer that was posted- I think it looks fantastic CGI and action-wise... but did anyone else notice what looks like an alien tentacle at 1:19-:20? I thought aliens were a big no-no in the BSG world.

In the concept art that was released last summer, there was what looked like a Cylon worm-shaped robot, which is what I assume that was.

DarkCrawler
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin

Mahoning posted:

Hey guys, gently caress WWII movies cuz we know how it ends, AMIRITE?!

Sorry but I just don't see how that argument makes any sense. Good writing is good writing and if they are telling interesting stories, I don't give a poo poo how it ends. "Not about the destination, its about the journey, etc. etc."

Say what you will but "how did they get here" stories can be done very well. Hell, the most interesting part of the TV show Lost was seeing their backstories, how they came to be how they were at the time we first met them in the wreckage on the beach.

It's a solid argument on paper, but fails to take into account all the amazing backstories there are to tell.

Nobody is saying that its going to be done well, but to dismiss it on premise alone is naive and stupid and screams of "I'm a BSG nerd don't ruin it for meeeeeeee".

No, we don't know how it ends. The story is still going on and we are all living it. :colbert: That's the beauty of historical stories - I'm not bummed that Caesar dies because I know Augustus is coming, and so on. If 50 years later WWIII ended in a ball of fire in the place of Earth and the story of the only survivors ended in the literary equivalent of a wet fart I could see how whatever aliens would be kind of bummed in watching WWII stories.

And fictional stories work in this way too, if the sequels are left open enough. See Terminator, A Song of Ice and Fire, etc. But BSG ended as finally as a show could end, all our characters died in what we can assume are various terrible prehistoric ways to go and in the end none of their actions really amounted into anything tangible besides a really loving good rock song.

counterfeitsaint
Feb 26, 2010

I'm a girl, and you're
gnomes, and it's like
what? Yikes.
I don't dislike prequels not necessarily because I know how the story will end. That can make interesting storytelling more difficult, but not impossible. I generally dislike prequels because they often mess up the original story. Either some characters/entities actions don't make any sense now based on their past events, or you find out something the significantly lessens the impact of a major event in the original story. At worst, prequels just retcon a ton of poo poo.

Blood and Chrome could be good, but odds are eventually they will do something like introduce Tigh and some doctor will discover he's not human and either get killed or the government will cover it up or something. Or maybe we learn the government knew about the final five arriving and why the war ended all along, but never told anyone, and were in secret communication with Ellen the whole time.

You're right, of course, that all of this can be sidestepped by good writing, but there are just so many more mistakes to be made.

thrawn527
Mar 27, 2004

Thrawn/Pellaeon
Studying the art of terrorists
To keep you safe

I know prequels don't have to be bad as a rule, but I was having this discussion the other day with some people I know and we had a really hard time coming up with good prequels. Reboots don't count, and they're not telling the old story but inventing a new one that doesn't actually fit with the canon, so they don't fall into the same pitfalls. Oh, and Temple of Doom doesn't really count either, because the only thing that makes it a prequel is the date at the beginning.

So...all we could really come up with was X-Men: First Class. And Godfather II, but that's both prequel and sequel, so it kind of cheats.

At this point, I'm rather hesitant to support any prequels, as clearly no one knows how to actually pull it off. Granted, Prometheus may make me eat my words.

rolleyes
Nov 16, 2006

Sometimes you have to roll the hard... two?
I'm holding judgement on Promethius until I see reviews. I know it's not even really tied to the Alien storyline but the mess of most modern attempts to exploit the franchise has made me very wary.

incredible bear
Jul 10, 2005

doing the bear maximum

counterfeitsaint posted:

Blood and Chrome could be good, but odds are eventually they will do something like introduce Tigh and some doctor
I got ahead of myself while reading this and now I want to see Cottle go through medicine school during the Cylon War.

dmccaff
Nov 8, 2010

incredible bear posted:

I got ahead of myself while reading this and now I want to see Cottle go through medicine school during the Cylon War.

Cigarette in his mouth while in class.

Admiral Bosch
Apr 19, 2007
Who is Admiral Aken Bosch, and what is that old scoundrel up to?
I just convinced a friend to start watching BSG; she finished the miniseries tonight. I was watching on Netflix the same time as she was, and now I'm stuck reliving the series through the music available on youtube. I only just now discovered Bear playing his songs on the piano. I am so happy.

McSpanky
Jan 16, 2005






thrawn527 posted:

At this point, I'm rather hesitant to support any prequels, as clearly no one knows how to actually pull it off. Granted, Prometheus may make me eat my words.

The Prometheus timeline and keynote speech on the official website are really loving cool, I hope the movie can keep up with that and give us a prequel which actually fits into the fictional universe and doesn't suck out loud.

The difference between a prequel and a documentary is that a prequel is almost always developed after the story it's supposed to precede, which can cause all kinds of plot problems and seems to induce an unusually high degree of hack writing in the form of "cute" or "clever" callbacks to the original property.

Another rare exception to this trend is the Babylon 5 TV movie "In The Beginning", which is widely hailed as both the best of the B5 telemovies and a great tale in its own right, although it does have a framing story in the future of the series and so may not count for the same reason Godfather II doesn't. (I think both should, since making a coherent prequel/sequel doubleheader HAS to be harder than just doing one or the other, right?)

Admiral Bosch
Apr 19, 2007
Who is Admiral Aken Bosch, and what is that old scoundrel up to?
How can I convince a friend that just started watching to keep watching? She's at the point in season 1 where the 'God' in the show is starting to be apparent, at least as far as Baltar/Head Six are concerned. She's also a pretty diehard atheist, so now she just thinks it's all "stupid." She seemed to be enjoying the show up until now.

incredible bear
Jul 10, 2005

doing the bear maximum
If they've got a problem with people believing in God, tell her to get off this planet (or kill a lot of people). BSG is a post-apocalyptic show, there's going to be people left that still have faith. Eventually those people will burn bibles and blow their brains out.

Get better friends.

haveblue
Aug 15, 2005



Toilet Rascal
If any kind of spirituality at all is a total dealbreaker, then she will probably not enjoy the rest of the show, or any of a vast number of other excellent shows I can think of, but that's her loss.

incredible bear
Jul 10, 2005

doing the bear maximum
Urgh, who gives a gently caress about Omar's mum being shot at on a Sunday, screw this show.

Admiral Bosch
Apr 19, 2007
Who is Admiral Aken Bosch, and what is that old scoundrel up to?

incredible bear posted:

Get better friends.

That's actually really good advice. =/

Drunk Driver Dad
Feb 18, 2005
As an athiest, it never bothered me because I just told myself "If God belongs anywhere, it's in my fiction" Seriously, it's fiction so it shouldn't have anything to do with her real life beliefs, she's just being dumb.

DarkCrawler
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin
If somebody is offended by seeing things they don't believe in fiction there is something wrong about them. And they may need a slap.

I mean don't get me wrong, the way that the show eventually handled religion WAS balls-out stupid but it had nothing to do with it being religion. And until the end it always had the potential to have a conclusion worth all of the hand-wrangling.

DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 11:54 on Apr 14, 2012

Electromax
May 6, 2007
I'm an atheist but I would be very surprised if any sort of human civilization didn't have at least a portion of believers. Humans seek answers by nature and God can provide those, whether you personally get into them or not.

Basically, I think it makes sense that faith would play a role in the last tiny surviving band of human civilization. What else do some of these people have left?

Red Crown
Oct 20, 2008

Pretend my finger's a knife.
This series always shows me something new, and I'm on my...fourth watch through now. I'd never really picked up on the nuance in Lambkin's character - The story he tells to Caprica Six in The Son also Rises isn't entirely fake, it reflects how he felt after he lost his wife during the attacks on the colonies as revealed in season four. Never picked up on that connection before.

That, and Admiral Adama talking to Kat on her deathbed at the end of The Passage. I'd forgotten that he tells her that him and his wife had always wanted a daughter.

Kull the Conqueror
Apr 8, 2006

Take me to the green valley,
lay the sod o'er me,
I'm a young cowboy,
I know I've done wrong

Red Crown posted:

That, and Admiral Adama talking to Kat on her deathbed at the end of The Passage. I'd forgotten that he tells her that him and his wife had always wanted a daughter.

"And it was such a blessing that Kara became a part of my life. Excuse me, Kat, I think I'm going to go see how she's doing. Get well soon."

Party Plane Jones
Jul 1, 2007

by Reene
Fun Shoe

Admiral Bosch posted:

How can I convince a friend that just started watching to keep watching? She's at the point in season 1 where the 'God' in the show is starting to be apparent, at least as far as Baltar/Head Six are concerned. She's also a pretty diehard atheist, so now she just thinks it's all "stupid." She seemed to be enjoying the show up until now.

If she's ever watched Rome then she should realize that literally every prayer or curse throughout the series is answered. It's a conspiracy of the Gods. :ssh:

298298
Aug 14, 2011

by Y Kant Ozma Post
I guess I'm in the minority because I have no interest in ever seeing them beat the dead horse that is BSG again after the last season of BSG, Caprica, The Plan, and even Razor was really lovely to me. Seasons 1 and 2 were really good, three it started to meander and season 4 was terrible overall (there were some really good episodes).

Did something big happen between seasons 2 and 3, or 2 and 4, like a major head writer leaving the show or something? I watched from the middle of season 1 to the end of the show weekly and remember a lot of people complaining during season 3 and 4 but I don't remember if we ever knew what exactly happened? Did Moore ever admit he was making poo poo up as he went and he never mapped out 'the plan'?

IRQ
Sep 9, 2001

SUCK A DICK, DUMBSHITS!

I think the consensus is that they never actually had a plan.

If you listened to the podcasts at all it's not hard to believe.

haveblue
Aug 15, 2005



Toilet Rascal

298298 posted:

Did something big happen between seasons 2 and 3, or 2 and 4, like a major head writer leaving the show or something?

Throughout seasons 2 and 3, there was a lot of pressure on the show to become more episodic. Also, halfway through season 4, the industry-wide writers' strike happened.

Moore has always maintained that he knew how the series was going to end, the problem was that he never seemed to put much work into aiming at that from the place the show was at any given time, resulting in the clumsy dragging together of threads at the end.

Adama
May 28, 2009

by Y Kant Ozma Post

haveblue posted:

Throughout seasons 2 and 3, there was a lot of pressure on the show to become more episodic. Also, halfway through season 4, the industry-wide writers' strike happened.

Moore has always maintained that he knew how the series was going to end, the problem was that he never seemed to put much work into aiming at that from the place the show was at any given time, resulting in the clumsy dragging together of threads at the end.

The impression that I always had was that Moore planned short-term while having certain major events planned in advance, such as:

:chord: Yeah, and then they'll find "Earth", but it's a nuclear wasteland!

until the:

:staredog:: OH poo poo- how much time do we have to do it?!?! Assemble the writers from Star-Trek... no, Voyager...

Aeka 2.0
Nov 16, 2000

:ohdear: Have you seen my apex seals? I seem to have lost them.




Dinosaur Gum
Did the cylon war oil painting on a budget since those things are 400 dollars. I got myself the poster for 15 bux and framed it. I think I'm going to get some non glare glass:

BogDew
Jun 14, 2006

E:\FILES>quickfli clown.fli

Aeka 2.0 posted:

I got myself the poster for 15 bux and framed it. I think I'm going to get some non glare glass
And saw the corners off at right angles.

bango skank
Jan 15, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
A strange world, where man has mastered AI and FTL travel, but can't seem to get the right angle down.

Chairman Capone
Dec 17, 2008

I'm at a political theory conference at Cornell this weekend. By complete coincidence, I learned that the guy I'm staying with is teaching a course called "The Politics of Battlestar Galactica". I am hugely jealous of both him and his students.

Adama
May 28, 2009

by Y Kant Ozma Post
The Cylons fought with swords during the First Cylon War?

LooseChanj
Feb 17, 2006

Logicaaaaaaaaal!

Adama posted:

The Cylons fought with swords during the First Cylon War?

In the original series the human/cylon war had been going on for a thousand years.

I always thought the archaic style in Adama's painting was a callback to Kobol but even that doesn't make sense because most of their history from that period was gone and it seemed like there being cylons on Kobol was unknown.

It's probably just that the painting is supposed to be old, and what's older school than a sword? (Sure, a rock onna stick, but what's older than a sword and still suggests technology?)

Illegal Clown
Feb 18, 2004

LooseChanj posted:

In the original series the human/cylon war had been going on for a thousand years.

I always thought the archaic style in Adama's painting was a callback to Kobol but even that doesn't make sense because most of their history from that period was gone and it seemed like there being cylons on Kobol was unknown.

It's probably just that the painting is supposed to be old, and what's older school than a sword? (Sure, a rock onna stick, but what's older than a sword and still suggests technology?)

Plus the Cylons in the original series carried swords.



I seem to remember a scene in the mini series where two kids were seen wearing Cylon masks and playing with wooden swords. So yeah, it's all a throwback to the original series.

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VaultAggie
Nov 18, 2010

Best out of 71?
Would this be the right place to talk about the main series? I'm marathoning through it right now and I'm currently about halfway through Season 2, right after Admiral Cain(?) dies.

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