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Eh, I was looking forward to B.C. but the above quote and that trailer kind of made me ambivalent on that issue. A purely action-based telling of the first war isn't enough. Military and political intrigue is also needed in addition to philosophical contemplating on the machine/man issue and morality - Cylons were actually good guys in THIS war, after all whereas in BSG they were a step above the SS when it came to pure evil. Besides, it's all kind of futile anyway. Like a WWII story when 50 years later Earth dissappears in a ball of fire and the story of the only survivors ends in even a lamer and more frustrating way. So I'm actually fine with no more BSG. And gently caress SyFy forever. Dumbest channel ever.
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Mar 22, 2012 13:44
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The difference between Batman, Terminator, Aliens and those other shows is that they left interesting avenues to explore, and not just in prologue stuff. Only way I could think Blood and Chrome might have been good if it completely abandons the hint hint wink wink nod future poo poo and presents it as a completely self-contained story. Having some random punk play young Adama isn't going to accomplish that. Do new characters and make us care about them and their particular stories, then we can ignore their connections to BSG because said connections really won't exist. Because BSG didn't leave things open. It closed it definitely and finally and left me personally with a bad taste in my mouth. I don't care about young Adama because BSG ended with Bill Adama and only things that happened after that involved lot of loincloths, caveman sex and people dying in various terrible pre-historic ways. So give us a new character story. If there is one thing BSG writers can pull well it's engaging characters and situations. Even better though, have it nothing to do with BSG and make a new franchise...
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Mar 29, 2012 16:24
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Senor Tron posted:That comment about the Cylons being the good guys in the first war makes me wish that we had seen that side of things addressed more in the show. Once they started into "kill all humans" territory they were clearly in the wrong, but the war started with the Cylons wanting their freedom from slavery. Would have been nice to see some indication that there were people in the first war who had issues with it. The second war isn't even the same Cylons or the same humans. 57 years later means that 99% of humans who were alive in the first war were too young to have any fault or stake in enslaving the Cylons in the first place. In the second war, Cylons were completely wrong. In the first one, they were completely right. Hell, Adama even tells how the humanoid Cylons enslaved the mechanical ones, so they weren't even completely wrong but hypocrites to boot. Which is why it was so ridicolous how BSG tried to play around about "both sides are the same and need to make up" and how Helo wasn't quartered and drawn after he stopped humans from killing all of them. Seriously, that equivalency poo poo kind of falls flat when the other side can as best be described as an insurgent group who just survived a genocide, resorting into some desperate stuff and the other side is the equivalency of the Nazis having a baby with the Confederacy that is also religiously fundamentalist to boot. Probably the worst failing in the show. Okay, right after the ending.
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Mar 29, 2012 17:11
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Mahoning posted:Hey guys, gently caress WWII movies cuz we know how it ends, AMIRITE?! No, we don't know how it ends. The story is still going on and we are all living it.  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.
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Apr 3, 2012 16:07
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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 |
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Apr 14, 2012 11:52
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IRQ posted:Stop halfway through season 4. It's a perfectly good end point and the show is complete dogshit after that. I think stopping halfway through Season 4's last episode makes for the best end. You still see everything that is good in Season 4 but you don't have to suffer through the big bag of rotten dog diarrhea that is the final 30 minutes of Battlestar Galactica. I mean unless you like dogshit, which is just fine, we all have our sins. Literally every proposed ending is better then what we actually got. It's the worst finale in TV, not on it's own merits (although it would still make top 5 easily) but because what preceded it was so loving good and it just throws all of it in the trash. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Jun 11, 2012 |
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Jun 11, 2012 11:45
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Shorter Than Some posted:One thing that bugged me about the season finale was the fact that everyone just kinda goes along with Lee's decision. Maybe they took a vote off-screen or whatever, but still I can't imagine everyone being cool with the idea of dismantling their entire civilization to go live like cavemen. The funny thing is that it wouldn't have been unimaginably difficult to write an actual reason for them to get rid of the ships if they absolutely had to go that route. Too much space radiation or something. Unstable cores after 4+ years without any decent maintenance and they might blow up any moment. Leftover Cylons that might be able to track them. But no, the writers go with "Let's live like cavemen because FUTURE ROBOTS".
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Jun 11, 2012 12:19
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Thwomp posted:But that does fit with the overall theme of breaking the cycle which explicitly involved technology leading to ruin. The only way to get rid of the ships but make everything follow was to get rid of all their technology. But that doesn't break the cycle, it simply pushes it forward for 200,000 when once again mankind doesn't know how to handle it responsibly. Here we have a society which has deeply and personally experienced where not treating machines with respect leads to, with ACTUAL machines amongst them, a chance to build a human/cylon society which can finally co-exist, and what do they do? Toss the machines into the sun, separate the humans and cylons except for two examples and ensure that in around 1000 years everything has either been forgotten or is at best a scary campfire story with absolutely nothing preventing it happening again. Look at our history. What exactly screams "living responsibly with technology" to you? The military drones? Covert surveillance? Agent Orange? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Way to go Lee. Thwomp posted:Plus, it isn't that much of a leap to go to everyone and say, "Look, we've had a hell of a time trying to survive with our tech and the tech that evolved and tried to kill us. Let's just drop it all and live within nature's constraints?" It's not the cleanest way to abandon all the tech but it plays into the themes running throughout the show. It's a huge, gigantic leap to assume. Even in the fleet they had 21st century healthcare, constant source of food, fresh water, warm beds, modern plumbing, etc. I could see Lee and maybe other people consent to that just because their experiences have been so much more tremendous compared to the population at large. Everyone else? No. Besides, even if all 50,000 people magically lose their minds, they don't actually guarantee anything. There wasn't anyone who said "Waaiit, since we can't write anything down or keep any sort of permanent records because you just dropped our means to do so to the sun, how do we know that our descendants won't create death robots?" It's just so, so stupid and there would have been dozens of better ways to go to. I don't understand how the team who gave us seasons 1-3 could gently caress up that hard.
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Jun 11, 2012 17:19
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Thwomp posted:Ugh. Lee's plan wasn't ever stated to permanently break the cycle for all eternity. Just to break it there and then and hope for the best in the future. I'm pretty sure his intention was to break the cycle. That implies some sort of you know, permanent status. And really after all their sacrifices, literally billions of dead in God knows how many civilizations and finally they have a chance to end it all and they go for "ambiguous"? When they could have literally made "RESPECT. TECHNOLOGY." a law, religion and unforgettable ethos of their entire society by retaining their technology. Thwomp posted:No it's not. Just look how quickly people decided to stay on New Caprica. Now that was a shithole planet and even with their technology, life was still hard. But the colonials wanted to settle somewhere because living in a ship sucked rear end. Hard. But not hunter gatherer hard. Not anywhere close. They had farms and houses, and bathrooms. Go to the shittiest most dirty Siberian town you can find and ask them if they want to move into warm, sunny Africa and spend their days collecting berries, eating insects and chasing prey for dozens of miles and they will look you like you are a lunatic. And it's a powerful idea if you are a lunatic. But I didn't think the people in the show were lunatics. This is a society where for the last four seasons we've had a political fight over everything and when they reach a paradise planet and it's untapped resources in front of it, they decide to stay gently caress to all of those resources and become children of the nature? Make it actually ridiculously hard to live in that Eden? ALL of them? If there is one thing Galactica did well it showed the realistic nature of how their society reacted into everything that came in front of them. They were never unanimous in everything. And it was very well written. The finale crapped all over it. And I would argue that technology in itself was not the problem. It's no problem to like the ending, if you ignore the actual content, the music, the scenery and all that is very powerful. But Battlestar Galactica was always able to deliver exceedingly well written scenes that also had great music and visuals. That's what I wanted. Not something that ignores everything established thus far.
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Jun 11, 2012 18:18
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Teek posted:For people who don't like the ending, would it have worked better had it not been our past? I mean, one problem people seem to have is that we know what happened afterwards. Ignoring that, would giving up technology without knowing what will happen in the future make it play better? Pretend it's some other Eden world they found. See, the thing to me is that thematically giving things up didn't make much sense. The whole series to me was about the Cylons and humans learning to co-exist and understand the responsibilities they have in regards of eachother, technology, etc. Hera to me seemed to be beginning of their co-existence, proof that it can work, not the Alpha and Omega of it. The shape of things to come not THE thing. To me it seemed that the culmination would be that the remaining Cylons and humans build a society and a civilization together, whether in space or in a planet. And the series WAS heading towards it. Another Cylon/human pairing. Cylon pilots in the fleet. Adama transfers his command in the basestar. Cylons earn a seat in the government. They rescue Hera, proof and beginning of their common future together. Instead what we get? - People separate into different tribes of few dozen people. I assume that everyone went off in their own familiar communities since the Galactica crew ended up together. So that means no Cylon/Human pairs other then Baltar/Caprica Six and Athena/Helo. - Hera is the only Cylon human child. She dies young after crapping out some babies (baby?) in one part of Earth. If Hera was half-cylon-half-human, in a thousand generations Ugg, a random Neanderthal living in what will become Bulgaria will have more impact on the future of humanity then she did. And besides... - Cavemen are by far the most populous group on the planet and it is THEIR experiences and culture that defines humanity, not the Colonials or Cylons. We know they didn't give us language. We know they didn't give us anything else except traces of a really awesome song. That's it. That's where all the four seasons ended up. They were wiped out and nothing came out of their massive epic story through the stars. And only people - only people who know the story are two sadistic demigods making jokes about their psychopathic omnipotent creator who probably doesn't even pay any attention to its experiment anymore. It's the equivalent of a really loving awesome musical performance with a bitching guitar solo. But at the end the song starts dying out in a weird way and the artist makes strange noises and faces and then the song ends abruptly and he takes a big steaming dump on his guitar and uses it to fling the turd in your face. The ending wasn't cheap and lovely just because it gave the characters unrealistic decisions that made no sense based on previous events, but it also seemed to gently caress over the theme as well. To me Battlestar Galactica was never about TECHNOLOGY BAAADD or at least it wasn't the main point it was trying to make. The music and visuals of course rocked, as well as actor performances. Which I guess explains how it's still liked by some. But imagine reading that poo poo on a storyboard or a book. So, I maintain that the real heroes of the series were the Cylon Centurions, who took to the stars to build something greater, not wipe out all of their culture and potential in the fear that it might lead into something terrible. The Humans and Humanoid Cylons are fundamentalist purists afraid of the sin, so bad that they remove every achievement humanity has ever made just try to prevent it. The Centurions are the sin itself and nonetheless try to make the best of it. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jun 11, 2012 |
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Jun 11, 2012 19:46
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Thwomp posted:Dude, you missed the point. The whole series was about Hera and getting both societies, Human and Cylon, to the point where a child like her could be accepted and thrive. Because what happens on Earth? She's the progenitor of future humanity. She is the shape of things to come. She is one of the many, many progenitors of future humanity, not really that significant in the larger scheme of things, Mitochondrial Eve doesn't mean what I think you think it means. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Not_the_only_woman Only a small, tiny, atom-sized part of our common ancestry comes from her. I like to think that it's the lyrics to All Along the Watchtower, but that's pretty much it. Not much of a shape of things to come. And call me strange but I assumed that a Cylon/Human hybrid would precede a Cylon/Human society. Not a Cylon/Human/Shitload of "I guess we can gently caress them too so let's call them humans" society. quote:Also, I thought the remaining Cylons mixed with the Colonials so further Cylon/Human hybrids were possible, just not Mitochondrial Eve. Why would they? They still had at best an uneasy relationship with the Cylons. Why would they have one or two of them hitch along? quote:And I don't know what you're talking about with Cavemen. Lee's pep-talk explicitly implies the Colonials help provide language, agriculture, and learning. While it's not heavy farming equipment, it is the basics for a new civilization. And the indigenous population was essentially there to provide extra genetic diversity. Nope. It's our world. First civilizations would emerge over a hundred thousand years later. First anywhere close to a sophisticated language around 50,000 years later. First written records alongside the first civilizations. Which means that they either created a civilization and something horrible happened to it and they were wiped out, or they were wiped out without ever managing to do anything. Either way not much of a happy ending. And also, they are incapable of agriculture since they don't have enough population for that. Casting aside the fact that the ancestors of any cultivable plants they would possibly have familiarity with don't even exist yet with the possible exception of some distant relative of yam.
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Jun 11, 2012 21:53
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Thwomp posted:I know what that term means. The fact that all of us have some part Cylon in us represents a possible break of the cycle. That's the point. It's kind of a lovely half-assed attempt at trying to break it which doesn't exactly make for a grand finale. And from what modern times have been like it's not looking very good. Hell, the head angels don't seem to hold it in a very high regard if we talk about the show too. Thwomp posted:Because they just helped destroy the "bad" Cylons and were flying with the Colonials for a while even before Daybreak. They proved themselves which is why they weren't banished along with the Centurions. Doesn't mean they wanted to spend the rest of their (short) lives with them. And the Centurions weren't banished, they were given the basestar so they could make their own destiny. Thwomp posted:I think you're taking the whole idea too literally. The show doesn't explain exactly how we got from Cylon/Human/Hybrids to modern times, it just says here's a dot and here's another dot and they are connected. But it doesn't say exactly how many loops or detours it took to get there. Just that these two points are important and related. But we know the beginning and the end and the setting (Earth, and ours). From those three things we can pretty safely infer that their experiment didn't end very well. And I don't think I am being too literal in either case. There was definite religious and symbolic aspects of Battlestar Galactica. I don't deny that. Hell, there are angels and a God and the whole poo poo was carried on by prophecies and magic and so on. But underneath it all was a hard and ever-present realism - realism in politics, realism in human nature, realism in survival. I'm not going to toss it all in the trash for the last 30 minutes. Kull the Conqueror posted:
Well that doesn't excuse a lovely plot. Writing factors in too.
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Jun 11, 2012 22:42
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The medium is the message. It's not a storyboard or a book. It's an audio-visual narrative. Thus, it's a waste of effort to worry about what it looks like on paper.
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CrazedEwok posted:How would you have liked it to end, then? I had figured from the beginning that they were in the past, and I liked it that way. How else could it have ended in order to preserve that connection to us? If they had kept all their technology on our present Earth, why did it take us 150,000 years to get anything close to it? It's not the best ending, no, but it was emotionally satisfying to me and fit within the context, the temporal restrictions, and theme. I had no thoughts about them being in past or no wishes for them to be there regardless. I thought the season 3 Earth reveal was million times more powerful then what we got in the finale. I would have been just fine if that was it for Earth and the show took a different direction. The Fleet's situation was not hopeless, they had already encountered at least three or more habitable planets on the way. Something like Adama transferring his command on the basestar, with an Cylon XO and half-human half Cylon crew would have been a nice end scene for me. But if they absolutely have to be on Earth, make it somewhere where they don't have to become functionally suicidal to get rid of the technology problem. If they absolutely have to be in the past, make it so that they have some actual impact on the development of the planet and that the decision to abandon technology might actually make sense. For example have them arrive on Earth, 500 AD or similar take or leave a thousand years, really doesn't matter. They see a society which is embarking on the cusp of technological development but already has modern concepts such as record-keeping, medicine, plumbing, etc and there is a basis for them to build on instead of having to start from scratch. They see a chance for them to guide this young civilization(s) and it's development in a way that allows them to avoid the same mistakes. They don't want to become some sort of an overlord class and know that if they have the ships and technology and are the only ones with the skill to use them, that sort of a situation can't be avoided. They don't want to give nukes and guns to civilizations that still think that wiping out entire civilizations is a perfectly good way to conduct war, blah blah. So they send the ship to the Sun, drop down to a secluded spot and start intermingling with the natives. Rome, China, Africa, etc. Over the years they and their descendants attempt guide the course of technology. Major problems on the way of course and the inventions being used for bad things but the efforts persist. Show the same head-angel conversation at the end but this time they read a technology magazine or something with some sort of article about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Show shots of the Terminator or Blade Runner, I, Robot on a bookshelf, etc. Have them smugly comment about how the humans/Cylons have been able to keep the fear of robots in human memory and so on. Something more to spice it up. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Jun 11, 2012 |
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Jun 11, 2012 23:35
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LooseChanj posted:Lots of people today live their entire lives without modern medicine. Which the colonials didn't really have left anyway. Uhh, in the last episode when the massive battle was going on they had a full on medical stations with triage and all that stuff. Beforehand there were several episodes where they show the hospital, complete with pre-childbirth stuff and a brain surgeon coming to fix Sam, so yeah, one can safely assume that they had modern medicine and medical equipment left. Plus you know, they could have made more modern medicine had they not thrown their means to make them into the Sun.
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Jun 12, 2012 16:05
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Livebladder posted:Remember how everything built up to the final five cylons and in the end who and what they were weren't important at all Yeah, that was really great. Next re-watch I'm going to tally how much time they wasted on that plot line and then cry sad tears when I imagine what we could have gotten instead. BUTTHEFINALFIIVVEEE no Lucy Lawless shut the gently caress up 
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Jun 13, 2012 11:14
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gooby on rails posted:How did I know that, when this thread suddenly got 70 new posts out of nowhere, virtually all of them would be about the ending. What else is there to discuss now that BLOOD AND CHROME is dead? "That Pegasus. Sure is a loving good episode." "Yup." "Indeed." I mean there is only so many ways to say why Black Market is a bad episode. So, so many ways but you know, that poo poo is finite, not really hard to see and it's not like nobody disagrees with you or anything. While I keep finding new ways how the ending sucked salty balls with each re-watch. Speaking of which, now that I'm back home it's time to watch BSG again
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Jun 14, 2012 11:22
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incredible bear posted:What BSG quotes do you guys still use on a frequent basis? "Then I am terminating your <insert here> as of this moment." When someone disagrees with me about something.
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Jun 15, 2012 13:23
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Kull the Conqueror posted:For my money, of course they shouldn't have done it. Piece of a man's soul, etc. Why though? It was a textbook example of self-defense. Cylons were as pure evil as one could probably get to and were still trying to kill all humans on a daily basis. Hell, the only good Cylon, Athena, was on Galactica and would have been saved. I don't see anything morally wrong about their actions. It's like if you could have killed every Nazi on the planet with a press of a button. After they had won WWII and were trying to kill the remaining Jews. Crosscontaminant posted:I can buy military nerds making sex jokes about Lieutenant Pantsoff's interrogation method to deal with the guilt of having to be complicit (given that Cain shot her XO for disobeying orders) but the idea that they'd go from guilty silence to active participation doesn't fit. I'm not sure what you are saying here, you don't believe that soldiers would rape people voluntarily or...?
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Jun 16, 2012 11:24
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Kull the Conqueror posted:No, I'm pretty sure it would have been more like killing every German on the planet with the press of a button after they had won WWII. That's the issue. Caprica Six and Boomer (for all her subsequent failures) had proven that they were conscious beings capable of independent thought with a little push. Did a great deal of them deserve more condemnation by the end of the show than they got? I might grant you that. Did the entire race, one that turned out to be completely manipulated by a single malevolent tyrant at the top named John, deserve to be snuffed out with ease? Hell the gently caress no. Of course they were conscious beings. Conscious beings who were evil. Cavil may have manipulated them but it's not like they ever showcased any other personalities in the show. And it seemed that they didn't need much push in committing a Holocaust on humans as the Plan showcases. Let's look at the ones that left Cavil. Everything "good" that they did - joining up with the Colonials for example - was either out of selfish reasons or desperation. They never showed any remorse or regret for killing billions and billions of beings. They didn't even help the humans out of free will in the end or because they were disgusted with Cavil - they turned on him because he didn't support their fundamentalist religion then got double crossed in turn and had nowhere else to go. And it wasn't selfless help even after that but they started demanding all sorts of favors from the people whose family and friends they had killed in exchange. Caprica Six and Boomer were the architects of New Caprica Occupation - a brutal military dictatorship where thousands were killed and the rest oppressed in dystopian conditions. Leoben was never motivated by anything else then his religious convictions, neither was D'Anna and they gleefully tormented and tortured Starbuck and Baltar to get where they wanted. Also, let's not forget that they happily participated in enslaving the machine Cylons and used them as their unwilling soldiers for years, freeing them only when it served their religious cowardly agendas. And those were the "better" models. The onces who shacked up with Cavil were worse. Sorry, they all were horrific human beings. Hell, they can't be even compared to your run-off-the mill Nazi party members, each of them were military commanders morally equivalent to hardcore SS members. When Galactica was about to kill them all they were still actively trying to wipe out humanity. It was self-defense. (and Helo is a traitor who should have spent the rest of the series in the brig) rolleyes posted:I don't think it was ever implied that things were hushed up. So far as I'm concerned Cain knew full well what was going on. Cain GAVE the orders. We see this in Razor. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Jun 16, 2012 |
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Jun 16, 2012 17:19
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I think a more fruitful analogy would be the question of a retaliatory nuclear strike. In the event of a massive first strike on your country, which will kill a majority of your country's population (and leave the rest scrabbling to survive for decades), do you choose to retaliate and inflict the same death and suffering on the aggressor's population? I mean, in the event that the missiles are already in the air, it doesn't matter. No number of people you kill will bring back any of the people who are going to die in fifteen minutes. This analogy doesn't work because there are no civilians on Cylon side. It's like asking if you would follow the nuclear strike on a compound where only the Soviet military and political leaders were. Also all of them made the decision to nuke U.S. and were okay with it. Also they have slaves. And like to partake in torture and horrific scientific experiments and random executions. Some of them are dangerous religious fundamentalists to boot. Also they have more nukes and if you don't kill them they will do their best to kill you as long as even one of you is alive. Why the hell would you not kill them?
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Jun 16, 2012 17:26
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Just remembered...only thing the humans should have guilt over is that the virus would kill the innocent enslaved mechanical Cylons as well. But considering how desperate they are I don't think they should be blamed for it, they are not the ones who enslaved them in the first place and forced them to fight their wars.
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Jun 16, 2012 17:51
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Kull the Conqueror posted:Because humanity is culpable for all that stuff too so it's hard to say they had the right to enact galactic justice through biological warfare, thus finally accomplishing the only atrocity that separated them from the Cylons. How are any of the people in Galactica culpable for the Cylon's actions?
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Jun 16, 2012 19:56
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Kull the Conqueror posted:Humanity, or the Twelve Colonies, is culpable for the same kinds of actions throughout their history. Throughout the show they keep asking themselves if they even deserve to survive, and if that's a tough question for them, they're probably not entitled to exact punishment on other groups of people, even if they're a genocidal people. So you are blaming the people of Galactica for the sins of other long dead people who they do not even know and this is why it is morally wrong for them to defend themselves against the Cylons? That's kind of a leap of logic.
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Jun 16, 2012 22:08
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Kull the Conqueror posted:You know what? It's not defense. It's a total act of aggression. It's preventative, but that's a scary word when it comes to killing millions of people all at the same time. It's defense if they are trying to kill you, have been trying to kill you for the past four years or so and they started it. Are they not supposed to shoot back when they shoot at them? Should they have plugged the guns in Galactica? There is nothing deplorable in killing evil people in self-defense. Unlike in (most of) our wars it is an actual FACT that the other side is pure evil. All Cylons were terrible in so many ways. Caprica Six is the best of them and she freaking snapped the neck of a newborn in her first appearance, didn't see her shedding tears about it afterwards. And hey, evil people are always capable of logic, creativity and love, hell, Hitler was a a great politician, a half-decent painter and had Eva Braun. But if a Jew had been holding a button in WWII that would have allowed him to kill all ranking Nazi members would he be a monster for pressing it? Would it be deplorable for him to kill actual volunteer combatants who had committed genocide on his family and friends? Is killing always wrong to you or something? DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Jun 17, 2012 |
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Jun 17, 2012 00:33
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Kull the Conqueror posted:That all sounds a lot like revenge, which I wouldn't call self-defense or justice. But above all else, it's something that will not and should never be a simple answer, because that's when we'll start losing what makes us worth living for. And I think that's what makes it a drat good BSG story arc. DURING WWII. Like they are still actively executing or trying to execute all the Jews in the world. How is it not a simple answer? How come a bunch of genocidal evil assholes can't be killed in self-defense especially when it prevents the death of innocents in the future? Kull the Conqueror posted:Here's a thing they could have done. Get the Cylons on the horn: "Hey assholes. We have that virus that could kill you all. gently caress off forever, and don't come to Earth. Bye." And then there would be no weight of genocide on their souls. And what if they find a cure for said virus? DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Jun 17, 2012 |
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Jun 17, 2012 13:42
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Of course it's a lovely situation when you are so desperate that you have to resort in killing ANYTHING but there is nothing morally wrong about them using the virus. Cops feel lovely sometimes when they kill a criminal or soldiers in a war but they aren't monsters for doing so.
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Jun 17, 2012 19:42
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Friendly Factory posted:Genocide is morally wrong. It's not a tough concept. Killing is killing. It doesn't matter how many you kill but what are your reasons for doing it.
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Jun 17, 2012 20:17
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Friendly Factory posted:That's a pretty terrifying thing to say. People are tricked into supporting horrible regimes (like Cavil's) constantly, but to say they all need to be wiped out for making that mistake? Jesus, dude. It's dehumanizing and incredibly immoral. Yeah, they were tricked, sure. And then they continued to be tricked into hunting down all remaining humans for years. And tricked into experimenting and torturing them. And into enslaving countless of their fellow machines to fight and die for them. And then they continued to be tricked into running a horrible prison camp/dystopian nightmare that was New Caprica. And then when that failed they were tricked into trying to kill all humans again. All of this, of course, decided by an unanimous democratic vote. I think at some point it stops being a "mistake" and starts becoming acceptable reasons for killing someone in self-defense. Oh yeah, and they don't actually need to be wiped out for any of that anyway, they need to be wiped out because they are still attempting to kill everybody. Flatscan posted:Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the future president of the united states. I think I have to be a native citizen for that. Murdering a family of four is worse then killing the entire combined leadership of Nazi Germany in an air strike, do you agree/disagree? DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jun 17, 2012 |
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Jun 17, 2012 20:57
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Friendly Factory posted:Wow, I think I'm going to have to defer to your avatar text on this one Ok.
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Jun 17, 2012 21:02
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I personally hate it because it makes no sense thematically compared to the rest of the series, makes the characters act like idiots and squanders away all of the efforts of the people in the series and any investment a viewer must have had on them, ending any possible excitement one might have had of all the foreshadowing with pathetic attempts at conclusions - if there is a conclusion at all. Friendly Factory posted:edit: Also, I think people hate it because God exists. That is not the reason for any of the arguments in this thread or previous ones that I have seen. I don't know about elsewhere. quote:1) What the gently caress was up with starbuck? I understand she was an angel but how did she just up and disappear like that? How did she get a perfectly intact Viper back to the fleet? God (aka. Something with Godlike powers but doesn't like to be called that) did it. quote:2) How was there a second Earth? After the first Earth was nuked, did the cylons rebuild another one or did there just happen to be a second, identical earth that was floating around? There just was. Starbuck, Angel of a God directed them to there. quote:3) Can someone explain the whole history of the Cylons? I really don't get what the final five did and how they set everything into motion. If the original 13th colony was made by Cylons, who made those Cylons? Humans born on Kobol > Create Cylons > Humans win, Cylons go to Earth (the destroyed one) > Humans leave Kobol for a unknown reasons, go to Twelve Colonies > Cylons of Earth learn how to reproduce and basically become humans > Create new mechanical Cylons who rise up and destroy Earth > Final Five, the remaining humanoid Cylons of Earth travel to Twelve Colonies where the humans who went from Kobol to the Twelve Colonies have created new Cylons and are at war > Final Five meet up with 12 Colonies Cylons and promise to give them humanoid bodies in exchange for ending the war > they build the Colony > manage to create human Cylons > human Cylons are assholes, one of them is more of a tremendous rear end in a top hat and they end up rebelling against both the Final Five and mechanical Cylons, brainwiping ones and enslaving the other, and destroy the Twelve Colonies > beginning of the series. Whew. There is a Wiki for BSG with detail: http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Cylon_History quote:4) Who was Daniel and why was Ellen so shocked when he was killed? I don't remember him popping up at all. Daniel was the remaining humanoid Cylon model and Ellen's favorite. quote:5) What was up with Projection Baltar and Caprica 6 strolling around town? Were they actual people or was it supposed to be symbolic? We don't know/God did it. quote:6) What was the Cylon plan all along that they kept showing on the intros? To have a human and Cylon fall in love so they could procreate without having to revert to a resurrection hub? That was part of their plan, apparently, and the plan was apparently just everything they did at the series. There was never a reveal of some big overarching secret plan. quote:7) What was the point of the Final Five? They led the fleet to hosed up Earth then did jack poo poo during the final showdown. Well, everything posted above was their point. It's your own decision if there was actually any point about it from a writing perspective. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Jul 4, 2012 |
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Jul 4, 2012 09:05
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I always thought the dad was either God or Daniel and was dissappointed when we didn't get an answer because leaving important elements of the plot up in the air is apparently good writing now.
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Jul 4, 2012 16:22
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LooseChanj posted:Because that worked out so well on Earth 1 and the Twelve Colonies. Neither were aware of there being a cycle, nor had learned to live peacefully with machines.
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Sep 3, 2012 13:46
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UnquietDream posted:They were certainly aware of something like that, with the whole gods and men living together in harmony thing when they go on Kobol. But the corruption of time has led certain parts of their history to be changed in the records. "Something like that" isn't really the same as actual direct confirmation from gods and people who had already experienced the cycle twice. It's really weird how bad people in BSG are in retaining information, though. We know history in thousands of years when we had nothing but scrolls and poo poo to write it down. People arrived in the Twelve Colonies two thousand years ago in spaceships and nobody remembers anything? It's like we wouldn't be even aware what those weird marble things in Italy and elsewhere are as opposed to knowing the name of each and every loving Roman Consul. Maybe Lee wasn't dumb, it was just that the whole idea of WRITING YOUR HISTORY DOWN YOU IDIOT NO DON'T TOSS YOUR PAPER AND PENCILS INTO THE SUN had actually never entered his culture. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Sep 5, 2012 |
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Sep 5, 2012 19:56
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Friendly Factory posted:Unless succeeding generations, perhaps under siege from highly organized genocide robots, had their society wiped out. Which happened on Kobol and Earth 1 (though that wasn't humans at all). Not hard to imagine they'd forget that. Are you really saying that it makes sense that the out of the millions, if not billions of refugees that fled to Twelve Colonies, nobody wrote down what happened? Nobody had a basic computer or PDA or a typewriter? They had spaceships but not pen and paper? And I think you missed my point entirely. We might not know half of what happened in ancient history but that was ancient history. And we still know more about our origins then the Colonials know about theirs - and their origins are a modern spacefaring civilization that escaped a modern spacefaring society. We don't think that the civilization of Carthage just magically vanished or that Babylon was taken to the skies by gods or something even though the Romans did not have modern information technology. gently caress, we divide our history and prehistory based on when people started writing things down. It's really pretty unrealistic that they don't know anything more then "Twelve Tribes, Kobol". Only way I can explain that and Lee's actions is that their culture had some sort of tabu against writing things down but then again Adama was a pretty avid reader so I don't know what the gently caress. (Well I do know what the gently caress, the writers didn't think about it at all) DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Sep 6, 2012 |
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Sep 6, 2012 09:34
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LooseChanj posted:A lot of people seem to think the 12 Colonies just picked up where Kobol left off, which isn't the case at all. Presumably the people who ended up at the Colonies were in the same situation as the Colonials themselves were at New Caprica: they had ships, but everything else was gone. They had a stash of drugs sure, but no means of producing them. That's the reason the whole "zomg they were so stupid to throw their tech away" is so silly; their tech was already gone. Most people in general don't have much appreciation for infrastructure (see the whole Obama "you didn't do it alone" kerfluffle). I really don't understand why you keep toting this line as it has not been refuted ten times before. If you have 30+ skyscraper sized ships with all their facilities, engines and materials, and a virgin Earth with all it's resources and space to utilize as you see fit, you can pretty much produce anything and build anything if given enough time. The show itself supports this point, as they were already planning to build a city in the series itself. No, they don't have infrastructure but they have the means, knowledge and manpower to build it easily. Please read the thread, or watch the show again, or something. It's getting kind of tiring. EDIT: How the hell do you think the escapees from Kobol managed to build up a population of 50 billion in two thousand years? Anonymous Zebra posted:During season 1, Ron Moore posted in this blog that the colonies regressed alot after they fled Kobol. They basically had only a few ships that landed on these 12 worlds spread across several star systems, lived for awhile on what technology they could pull off the ships, and then went native for quite some time. He mentions this to explain why their ships have a mixture of star trek tech (like jumpdrives and gravity) and 1970's submarine tech (like paper printers and big old phones). See now, they could have mentioned this in the show in like thirty seconds, and it would have made much more sense. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Sep 6, 2012 |
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Sep 6, 2012 16:53
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Sub Rosa posted:I think it's pretty tiring how this is the "let's run hating the finale into the ground" thread. Oh, it's been ran to the ground ages ago. I think we are at subterranean level right now. To be fair I didn't start it this time.
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Sep 6, 2012 21:14
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LooseChanj posted:Because it hasn't and you're a loving retard. No, it has been, you just mysteriously run away from the thread whenever you get a reply on that point. Literally every time. I can drag out any of them if you would care to reply this time? Friendly Factory posted:Are you aware how quickly language changes, how war can make languages lost and such? Language even 100 years ago is confusing as hell for modern people. Now think of the wars between the colonies before unification, the different languages therein and the loss of language which is inevitable. So yes, it makes sense when you think about it. "Confusing as hell for modern people" meaning "we have literally hundreds of thousands of written works of every kind from hundred years ago, in countless of languages, that anyone can read free from public library". gently caress, we have people who can read and speak dead languages. And we already have proof that the Colonials can read the language of Kobol and translate it - the Scrolls of Pythia. So no, it really does not make that much sense at all.
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Sep 7, 2012 09:04
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LooseChanj posted:I'm not wound up, I just think DarkCrawler is a drooling idiot. Millions or billions survived the war on Kobol? Gimme a fuckin' break. Drivel, like everything else he says. I've really just lost track of what you are actually trying to argue. If at least millions did not survive the war on Kobol, how do the colonies have a population of fifty billion only two thousand years later? Then you attempt to justify your defense of the finale by saying that the people who left Kobol had the same situation, only their ships. How exactly is population growth of that gigantic magnitude (even if they had several billion people left) without modern medicine, food production, and other such things brought by industry. In fact we know that there were inter-colonial wars, cultural exchange and such, which tells us that they were able to retain their space flight capabilities. This seems to tell us that surprise, if you have gigantic skyscraper ships and untapped resources of a habitable planet in front of you (much less twelve of them) it is effortless to build a modern society. It's like you create this elaborate fiction - actually ignoring what the show itself tells or shows us - in your head just to make yourself believe that the finale and the show's mythos makes complete sense and is carefully planned. We already know that the writers pretty much made it up on the fly, they have said as much. You are just probably going to insult me instead of replying (again), but I'd really like you to at least enlighten me on these strange leaps of logic you are doing here. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Sep 8, 2012 |
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Sep 8, 2012 21:21
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Friendly Factory posted:Man, you take obtuse to a whole new level. "Elaborate fiction"? "Effortless to build a modern society"? Are you a college dropout or something? The show made these things you argue about pretty damned clear. Dumping technology was the thing which served as a catalyst for the breaking of the cycle. I...never argued that it didn't? Friendly Factory posted:The ending heavily implies the cycle is broken. The ending is pretty vague on that. It can just as easily be seen as not being broken at all. Friendly Factory posted:edit: I mean hell, at least the guy who for some reason agrees with you is being cordial. You act like an rear end and then get all uppity when someone insults you back. Not sure how I'm "acting like an rear end". I'm also not uppity about Loosechang insulting me, I'm uppity about him doing that instead of replying to me. He can call me names all he wants, I'd just like an actual answer included with the insults too. I mean you call me names and also manage to engage me on the actual content. That's appreciated. LitigiousChimp posted:Who cares how they lost their history from Kobol? Maybe the Kobol refugees deliberately suppressed their history, and only kept their religious texts because they were a bunch of nutty fundamentalists. Maybe during their trip to the colonies they had massive computer problems and lost their only copy of wikikobol. After all, didn't Galactica have to wipe their computers at one point? Maybe they were anti-ebook and only kept books on paper, but their library ship was unfortunately destroyed on the way to the Colonies. It's not really that important, but they could have just as well written a way for them to lose their history that doesn't make them look like idiots. That's my problem with the finale too - not the fact that they lost the tech, but the fact that instead of writing a believable reason for them to lose the tech they made the characters suicidal retards instead. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Sep 8, 2012 |
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Sep 8, 2012 22:15
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Sub Rosa posted:I guess another question that follows along would be how many relative years did the Five experience in the 2000 years between Earth getting nuked and when they got to the colonies. They were traveling sub-light but really fast so time was passing slower for them, but how much slower? I don't know if he really looks that much younger or if it's just because he has more hair and less beard. Adama looks pretty much the same except for Adamastache. Anyway, it's pretty clear that the writers didn't think of this that much either. For example if Cylons die and age like humans, does that mean that all the Cavils always have like fifty years less time to live then all the Boomers and Sixes? That's kind of a lovely thing for the Final Five to do to one of their "children". Or if the humanoid Cylons on Earth were able to reproduce sexually, meaning that the Final Five were born presumably as babies, how come whenever anyone of the Final Five resurrects their body is the same age as what they were when they died? Why not 20 years old or something like that. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Sep 9, 2012 |
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Sep 9, 2012 13:25
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