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Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
Talk about Battlestar Galactica for whichever series you want. You've got the 78 series, the 2004 series and the upcoming series we know next to nothing about.

I just watched the sex comedy episode of the 2004 series (Where Ellen Tigh is found alive and well and starts hitting on everyone) and I wondered what the gently caress they were thinking.

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Bogus Adventure
Jan 11, 2017

More like "Bulges Adventure"
I like how the BSG effects from the OG show are used for Space Mutiny

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
I like how the Saga of a Star World pilot uses every single special effects shot into he series budget and then the rest of the show recycles into madness.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
My recollection is that the 1978 BSG producers got screwed by the network, because they went into the project thinking they were going to do a series of made-for-TV movies at a rate of one a month or so - which would have been far more feasible with late-70s technology - and then ABC turned around and said "that was great, we're ordering a full season of weekly episodes!" and left them scrambling for both scripts and opticals.

Cerv
Sep 14, 2004

This is a silly post with little news value.

Arcsquad12 posted:

Talk about Battlestar Galactica for whichever series you want. You've got the 78 series, the 2004 series and the upcoming series we know next to nothing about.


But we don't talk about Galactica 1980

That's fair enough

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?

Cerv posted:

But we don't talk about Galactica 1980

That's fair enough

I dont know what you're talking about, that never happened what do you mean Dirk Benedict spent an episode pulling around with a Cylon after crashing on a moon?

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

The last season of BSG remake is underrated, Gaeta and Zarek's coup, Galactica physically reaching its limits just from all the pounding she's taken and there desperate attempts to save her, the total despair everyone is in after finding Nuked Earth and having to find some way to move on despite that, the Cylon Rebels joining the fleet, its a lot of cool stuff. It does have a ton of flaws and less good EPISODES than most of the show, but its still got plenty of great parts.

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

Sanguinia posted:

The last season of BSG remake is underrated, Gaeta and Zarek's coup, Galactica physically reaching its limits just from all the pounding she's taken and there desperate attempts to save her, the total despair everyone is in after finding Nuked Earth and having to find some way to move on despite that, the Cylon Rebels joining the fleet, its a lot of cool stuff. It does have a ton of flaws and less good EPISODES than most of the show, but its still got plenty of great parts.

Dean Stockwell's character going "frak this" and killing himself so he doesn't have to deal with the finale is pretty good too

RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 01:07 on May 4, 2021

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
Dean Stockwell was easily the best Cylon actor and he just gave no shits about anyone. The Plan was a lovely made for TV movie but it was fun to watch because most of it was Cavil being an rear end in a top hat to people between episodes and making fun of the #5 Doral Cylons for being so unimaginative that their attempts to be different amounted to changing the color of their shirt.

Take the plunge! Okay!
Feb 24, 2007



I might've been 5 or 6, around the time of the original series (are we allowed to call it TOS? lmao), a friend of mine and I would hide from Cylons in a closet.

Also, the first season of the remake was a perfect encapsulation of the post 2001 mindset. It was so good at the time, wonder if it holds up.

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
The miniseries is a bit too slow but it does capture the immediate 9/11 "we're under attack and can't do a goddamn thing about it" panic, and then Season 1 is arguably the best overall season of the show with the way it builds up to the strike back against the Cylons in The Hand of God. You keep running from the schoolyard bully until one day you stop, turn around and punch him in the face. It earns that happy victory scene after ten episodes of unrelenting stress.

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
I'm onto Kobol's Last Gleaming Part 2 and the scene where Starbuck grabs the arrow of apollo there's a cameraman standing right in the shot and I can't unsee it.

Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


Arcsquad12 posted:

Talk about Battlestar Galactica for whichever series you want. You've got the 78 series, the 2004 series and the upcoming series we know next to nothing about.

I just watched the sex comedy episode of the 2004 series (Where Ellen Tigh is found alive and well and starts hitting on everyone) and I wondered what the gently caress they were thinking.

The rewatch podcast Tricia Helfer did (Battlestar Galacticast) had Edward James Olmos on for that episode and he talked about the process where it got made. Basically the network was like "every episode is too serious and too tied into other episodes, we need a one-off that has levity."

Overall I recommend listening to that podcast episode, since it has Edward James Olmos on it

Sanguinia posted:

The last season of BSG remake is underrated, Gaeta and Zarek's coup, Galactica physically reaching its limits just from all the pounding she's taken and there desperate attempts to save her, the total despair everyone is in after finding Nuked Earth and having to find some way to move on despite that, the Cylon Rebels joining the fleet, its a lot of cool stuff. It does have a ton of flaws and less good EPISODES than most of the show, but its still got plenty of great parts.

The coup episodes are legit good. But I quit watching after that point, because it's really obvious they had no idea how to wrap up. I mean, seriously. The penultimate episode is about the organization of the Quorum of Twelve to be based on what ship you live on, one episode before they quit living on ships?

Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 04:35 on May 5, 2021

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
Everything after New Caprica just kind of drifts and it has no forward momentum anymore. All that's left are the occasionally great one off episodes like Tyrol launching a union revolt on the fuel ships.

Of course then you also have stupid episodes like the only other doctor in the fleet being a space racist who somehow got away with murdering people from the anti-vaxxer planet for three years before anyone caught on in a fleet of less than 50,000 people.

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





Arcsquad12 posted:

Everything after New Caprica just kind of drifts and it has no forward momentum anymore. All that's left are the occasionally great one off episodes like Tyrol launching a union revolt on the fuel ships.

Of course then you also have stupid episodes like the only other doctor in the fleet being a space racist who somehow got away with murdering people from the anti-vaxxer planet for three years before anyone caught on in a fleet of less than 50,000 people.

I've said it repeatedly now but for as shocking and brilliant in the moment as ONE YEAR LATER was, it fundamentally broke the show and they just never recovered from it narratively speaking.

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
All this has been said before and all this will be said again?

Is there a good source for the production notes of the show? I know that Zoic Studios did the VFX work for Season 1 because they have a very clear and recognizable style, and from what I've gleaned Season 2 and parts of 3 were done by an in-house team and people from Atmosphere Effects from Vancouver.

But Season 4's cgi feels wildly different in terms of direction and texture work from the rest of the series. I dont know if this was the in-house team or a different vfx studio and I haven't been able to find much information on Season 4s production apart from the writers strike killing so many projects.

Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 21:43 on May 5, 2021

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

nine-gear crow posted:

I've said it repeatedly now but for as shocking and brilliant in the moment as ONE YEAR LATER was, it fundamentally broke the show and they just never recovered from it narratively speaking.

Can you elaborate on this? Because I don't really agree, I think Season 3 is incredibly good, although not as good as the show's peak in S 2 since it takes a few shortcuts with its larger narrative to make certain episodes happen and does admittedly have a few weak episodes in the run. The thing that broke the show and that they never managed to recover from was the reveal of the Final Five and Starbuck's return from the dead. Those two things were such enormous bombshells that the fallout they caused would have been hard for anyone to manage, but BSG did so in a particularly unspectacular way that led to the show on the whole falling apart and proving mostly unable to deliver good complete episode stories despite the presence of quite a lot of good parts in its last run.

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





Sanguinia posted:

Can you elaborate on this? Because I don't really agree, I think Season 3 is incredibly good, although not as good as the show's peak in S 2 since it takes a few shortcuts with its larger narrative to make certain episodes happen and does admittedly have a few weak episodes in the run. The thing that broke the show and that they never managed to recover from was the reveal of the Final Five and Starbuck's return from the dead. Those two things were such enormous bombshells that the fallout they caused would have been hard for anyone to manage, but BSG did so in a particularly unspectacular way that led to the show on the whole falling apart and proving mostly unable to deliver good complete episode stories despite the presence of quite a lot of good parts in its last run.

The need to even create the Final Five as a plot point goes right back to ONE YEAR LATER though. They'd only managed to reveal seven Cylons up to that point and then willingly thrust themselves into a put up or shut up situation with the Cylon occupation of New Caprica where they either had to immediately reveal the remaining five models still out there in the shadows, or rip their own leg off to get out of the bear trap and come up with a contrived explanation for why the remaining five just didn't seem to exist. They chose the latter and it was all down hill from there.

It's Ron Moore Season Finale Cliffhanger 101: come up with a shocking ending and make the leap without anything even planned out past "Mr. Worf... fire." Been that way since Star Trek TNG and it came home to roost on BSG like the Konovalov blowing itself up with its own torpedo at the end of The Hunt for Red October.

nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 10:51 on May 6, 2021

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

📈📊🍪😋



I'm just now finishing up a first-time watchthrough of BSG '78, and boy is it a trip. Mostly in realizing that almost every weird thing about the remake that I'd assumed was something invented for the new show actually had its roots in the original, right down to the numbered clones (in the Ice Planet Zero episode) and the "angels" => Head characters and the Terra/Earth fakeout. There's even a courtroom scene where Apollo plays lawyer, prefiguring Lee's role later. And in the penultimate episode ("Take the Celestra") they do that thing where they use the title theme music diegetically for a medal ceremony, which also happened in the miniseries and I thought was super funny at the time.

One more episode to go. And yes I'm going to watch 1980, idgaf.

I don't think I ever finished Caprica though. Did that show just go out as a totally wet fart or what?

Data Graham fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Jan 15, 2022

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
Blood and Chrome had more staying power than Caprica and it didn't even get a full series.

Milkfred E. Moore
Aug 27, 2006

'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.'
There was nothing wrong with One Year Later, and I'm always impressed by a particular poster's ability to show up with the most bizarre takes in seemingly just about every thread I read. There's dozens of ways you could handle the fact that we've only seen seven of the twelve Cylon models, and something special was established about them as far back as Season One. The biggest issue with Battlestar isn't even the lack of an overarching plot or even the bizarre reveal of the Final Five. The biggest issue with Battlestar, and why it's aged so poorly, is that the writers didn't know what the Cylons meant. That, and Battlestar is steeped in post-9/11 trauma - but that's a related issue.

Are the Cylons a metaphor for Muslims, or are they posthuman beings? They can't work on both levels because Muslims don't have supernatural abilities. The show doesn't really want to engage with what it means to make amends to the victims of a genocide conducted by one-hundred percent direct democracy. Literally every single Cylon was directly complicit with the attack on the Colonies. The fact that the core cast of characters basically browbeat and shame people for not agreeing to a Cylon alliance is really quite odious. It's remarkably similar to how the Expanse TV series has treated the asteroid strikes on Earth where the show isn't quite sure whether it's an apocalypse or a direct 9/11 analogy. Instead of committing to Scary Sci-Fi Cylons or It's A 9/11 Analogy (something difficult because of the sheer difference in scale between 9/11 and the Colonial genocide), the show bounces between whatever it feels like - in this episode, Cylons Are People, Too and only bigots have concerns about them. In this episode, Boomer plugs a cable into her arm and takes control of a bunch of Raiders.

The other issue - which really compounds the one above - is that the writers were laying clues and hints that they couldn't deliver on, leading to a pretty jumbled plot of Kobol, Earth One, Actual Earth, the Final Five, Angel Starbuck, and so on. The writers were too willing to do something for a dramatic moment and also too willing to be, uh, willing to retcon what the audience already knew - even extremely basic information like, say, Saul Tigh's history. The reveal of the Final Five is where the show goes completely stupid, and I say that as someone who thinks it's overall okay, if a product of its time.

Season 1 and 2 are great. Season 3 has some good moments but is overall weaker. Everything after that is just a mess. If not for the cast and the music, BSG wouldn't have managed to stay around as it did. It's a shame that they swapped their CGI team after Season 2, too, because the Resurrection Ship battle is phenomenal and everything afterwards is so weak by comparison.

Caprica... I've never actually watched it, but I think it was a victim of timing and expectations. The idea of a series where we see the people who created the Cylons and what Colonial society is like while getting into some man/machine philosophy - I think that's a great idea! But that'd be a hard sell to even the core fans of Battlestar, which was much more of an action sci-fi show and, really, not really concerned at all with philosophy. Which is why, say, Starbuck can have an actual divine resurrection and some mystical connection to Earth (WE'RE GOING THE WRONG WAAAAAAY) and the response the rest of the cast has is basically, hmm, that's weird.

Timby
Dec 23, 2006

Your mother!

nine-gear crow posted:

It's Ron Moore Season Finale Cliffhanger 101: come up with a shocking ending and make the leap without anything even planned out past "Mr. Worf... fire."

That one is entirely on Michael Piller, though, Moore had nothing to do with that two-parter (though he did write Family to put a bow on the whole thing).

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





Timby posted:

That one is entirely on Michael Piller, though, Moore had nothing to do with that two-parter (though he did write Family to put a bow on the whole thing).

Fair, but it IS a philosophy he picked up under Piller’s tutelage, as evidenced by his confession in the Season 1 finale commentary that he pitched an ending that consisted of Baltar walking into a pyramid on Kobol, finding Dirk Benedict listening to Purple Haze on a radio who then introduces himself as God and had no idea where the story continued onward from there.

Timby
Dec 23, 2006

Your mother!

nine-gear crow posted:

Fair, but it IS a philosophy he picked up under Piller’s tutelage, as evidenced by his confession in the Season 1 finale commentary that he pitched an ending that consisted of Baltar walking into a pyramid on Kobol, finding Dirk Benedict listening to Purple Haze on a radio who then introduces himself as God and had no idea where the story continued onward from there.

:what:

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
You find that shocking? Dirk Benedict IS God.

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013






The writers room had a meltdown revolt when they asked him “Okay, where are you going with this?” And he replied “I don’t know.” :haw:

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

Arcsquad12 posted:

You find that shocking? Dirk Benedict IS God.

I don't think God would write an MRA screed about his character being recast as a filthy woman being a symbolic castration of all men.

Item Getter
Dec 14, 2015

Data Graham posted:

I'm just now finishing up a first-time watchthrough of BSG '78, and boy is it a trip. Mostly in realizing that almost every weird thing about the remake that I'd assumed was something invented for the new show actually had its roots in the original, right down to the numbered clones (in the Ice Planet Zero episode) and the "angels" => Head characters and the Terra/Earth fakeout. There's even a courtroom scene where Apollo plays lawyer, prefiguring Zak's role later. And in the penultimate episode ("Take the Celestra") they do that thing where they use the title theme music diegetically for a medal ceremony, which also happened in the miniseries and I thought was super funny at the time.

One more episode to go. And yes I'm going to watch 1980, idgaf.

I don't think I ever finished Caprica though. Did that show just go out as a totally wet fart or what?

Caprica only lasted for one season iirc, it was based on soap operas and serial but really glacially slow paced. I think it was kind of cool to see a sci-fi series that was more down to earth instead of space action-based though there probably wasn't much of an audience for it. It could have been a better show if maybe they had let it be paced a bit faster since it often felt like it was dragging or spinning its wheels. After they knew that the show would not be renewed for further seasons, they ended the last episode with a flash-forward montage of future events that they must have planned for the later seasons. Though some of them came off as hilarious non sequiturs because they had had barely any lead-up in the actual show up to that point. (spoilers for the series ending obviously) Like the mostly unremarkable teenage girl character who had only just had a little bit of contact with the religious fundamentalist group getting a flash forward scene where she was suddenly their supreme Space Pope while not having visually aged at all. Also it was funny how they chose for shock value to kill off the one character who seemed unkillable being the only character to return in BSG (Young Will Adama), and said that the actual William Adama from BSG was a different kid that they adopted and named after the one that died in the show or something.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

📈📊🍪😋



Sanguinia posted:

I don't think God would write an MRA screed about his character being recast as a filthy woman being a symbolic castration of all men.

Lol did he really?

I guess if your casting is “you’re our Luke except he’s the womanizer in this one while Han is your straight man”, it tracks

I’d never seen him outside this show but I’m really starting to get tired of his forced “uh”s. Like I guess that counted as realistic delivery in the 70s but drat


Item Getter posted:

Also it was funny how they chose for shock value to kill off the one character who seemed unkillable being the only character to return in BSG (Young Will Adama), and said that the actual William Adama from BSG was a different kid that they adopted and named after the one that died in the show or something.

Oh yeah, I rember reading about that, it sounds like nothing so much as hilariously bad planning, even for BSG :v:

Data Graham fucked around with this message at 12:50 on May 7, 2021

Item Getter
Dec 14, 2015

nine-gear crow posted:

Fair, but it IS a philosophy he picked up under Piller’s tutelage, as evidenced by his confession in the Season 1 finale commentary that he pitched an ending that consisted of Baltar walking into a pyramid on Kobol, finding Dirk Benedict listening to Purple Haze on a radio who then introduces himself as God and had no idea where the story continued onward from there.

I think he pitched this idea to David Eick who then promptly dropped a 16 ton weight on him
Kind of funny that they had the idea for the sudden appearance of a Jimi Hendrix song from the earliest days of the show even though the Final Five reveal it was eventually used in was an obvious asspull.

Item Getter
Dec 14, 2015

Data Graham posted:

Oh yeah, I rember reading about that, it sounds like nothing so much as hilariously bad planning, even for BSG :v:

They clearly just thought "wouldn't it be cool if we killed off the only character who nobody thinks will die?", even if they had to immediately handwave it off afterwards.

Data Graham
Dec 28, 2009

📈📊🍪😋



Or they read that David Wong thing on Cracked about how if he were in charge of writing the Star Wars prequels he would have killed Obi-Wan off just to gently caress with everybody.

DrBouvenstein
Feb 28, 2007

I think I'm a doctor, but that doesn't make me a doctor. This fancy avatar does.
It always bothered me in the show how much the characters hand-waived away possible important things.

Like...people only ever seem to go back to the original 12 colonies, what...2 or 3 times? And given how relatively easy it was (other than Starbuck that one time, no one was killed or captured, right? Though I guess when whatshisname was helping Boomer (or was it the Athena version? I can't remember) get off planet it doesn't count because they let it happen intentionally.)

But surely there were supplies or other people? You're telling me that out of ALL the 12 worlds (of which we only see Caprica) the only survivors were a single loving basketball team? Though I think at some point there was a line about the massive radiation made it so no one could possibly live very long since nothing would grow anymore, but still.

But then they also find Kobol, by ACCIDENT! (well, I guess with angels and "God" existing, it was probably divine fate) And it should be the single most important find EVER for them, especially with how religious the general majority of them are, and they leave the next day. I guess "Cylons chasing them" was a factor, but, like...turn around and go back later? Send an expedition in a Raptor? IDK, seems like they glossed over the ORIGINS OF THEIR loving SPECIES AND CIVILIZATION rather quickly.

And they play real fast and loose with how far an FTL jump is. I think in the miniseries they mention they are jumping further than they ever have before, but don't give a number, to get to the supply depot, right? So that's still within the system, or a nearby one, at least, if it's a place they've been to regularly before. But then other times, as mentioned, people DO go back to Caprica...and then get BACK to the fleet, somehow? They just catch up...and also know where the fleet is, even though, in theory, that's hard to do? Like...the Cylons don't always know where the fleet is going They have a tracker on that one ship in the first episode, then after that I think it's mostly "lucky guesses" that the ships need water, food, ore, etc... to keep the fleet going and get there first. And they only find them on New Kobol because they detected the nuclear blast that one of the Number Sixes did, right?

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?

Sanguinia posted:

I don't think God would write an MRA screed about his character being recast as a filthy woman being a symbolic castration of all men.

I think BSG God would do that. He's a sociopath by the show's description.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

Arcsquad12 posted:

Blood and Chrome had more staying power than Caprica and it didn't even get a full series.

I remember hearing a big part of that was SyFy expecting mostly/all-CGI sets to save them a bunch of money, and then being rudely surprised to find out that it didn't actually save them much money at all.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
The bigger gripe I have with how BSG2003 turned in the third season was in how it abandoned the promise that it wasn't going to hit the reset button, that they weren't going to handwave away consequences for the sake of getting back to the format. My favorite example is the fuckin' "resurrection virus" plot line.

For those who don't remember: basically, there's a Cylon Basestar that's drifting in space because it found an artifact floating in space (that is allegedly tied to the 13th colony) and it made them sick with a virus... and the virus could be transmitted via the resurrection technology they use!

There's a bit where the Cylons that have Baltar find it and then run off, but the juicy part is where the Colonials find it, figure out what's going on, and then decide to use the resurrection virus to strike a blow against the Cylons. They're going to go bait the Cylons into a battle, where presumably they'll be in range of a Resurrection Ship, then kill the infected Cylons (thus transmitting the virus into the resurrection ship, and hopefully the entire Cylon network) and then jump away.

Big hero chisel-jawed Helo has a problem with this, he thinks it ain't right, so after the Galactica jumps into what they hope will soon be the combat area, he sabotages the life support for the holding cell the infected Cylons are in, killing them before the Cylon fleet jumps in and spoiling the plan. This works because for some reason, instead of having people with guns in the cell waiting to execute the prisoners the instant the Cylon fleet arrives, the marines (led be Apollo) have to walk across half the drat ship to get there after CIC calls to say "hey, we just spotted the fleet, go kill 'em," so nobody notices the Cylons asphyxiating until it's too late.

Meanwhile a big glitzy space battle is erupting outside - including the use of missile racks on the Raptors, which I don't think had ever been seen previously - and somehow none of the Vipers or Raptors are getting splashed. Apollo realizes the plan is hosed, they abort the battle and jump away. Adama and Helo and... Roslin and Apollo, I think? have a meeting where nobody's happy but no consequences are handed out for directly sabotaging a military operation explicitly ordered and authorized by the President.

Like, they could have tried softening it a little, maybe have it so that the operation wasn't strictly authorized after all or something like that, but no, there was a whole song and dance where President Roslin formally ordered Admiral Adama to use the infected Cylon prisoners to conduct biological warfare against the Cylons.



The whole thing just reeks of the producers getting cold feet and deciding they don't want to carry through the infected Cylon plot line after all. But also, oh no, we can't have anything bad happen to Helo, because he's their favorite i dunno they had plans for him or something? It was just ludicrously contrived to make his betrayal as consequence-free as possible, from the marines having to walk across the ship (so that no humans got asphyxiated as well), to seemingly not taking any casualties at all during a pitched fire fight with the Cylon fleet. I used to wonder if one of the producers went on vacation before the plot line went into production, then came back and saw the episodes coming down the pipeline and pitched a huge fit over it.



And then there was the loving magical half-breed Cylon baby blood that cures cancer... or at least puts it into remission for just long enough for Mary McDonnell to finish out the show.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
Someone else also once pointed out how, during the two (three?) parter where there's a map room on an algae planet and a star that winds up going nova, Cavil ends one episode going "gently caress it, we're immortal machines, we don't need a map, we can just spend the next ten thousand years visiting literally every star system in this loving galaxy if we have to" and then starts the next episode going "ooh, gee, that map's pretty important, we'd better not risk them nuking the planet..."

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

The bigger gripe I have with how BSG2003 turned in the third season was in how it abandoned the promise that it wasn't going to hit the reset button, that they weren't going to handwave away consequences for the sake of getting back to the format.

My favourite one of those is "Hero", aka the "Adama and Tigh are secret war criminals, oops" episode. Aka the "we wasted Carl Lumbly on THIS poo poo" episode.

It starts with Rosland giving Adama a made up medal for how loving awesome he's been and Adama's like "eh, I don't know if I deserve this or not." And then suddenly a guy we've never seen or heard of before jumps into the middle of the fleet using a stolen Raider that he bio-jacked like Starbuck did in Season 1. It turns out he was Adama's flight leader back when he commanded the Battlestar Valkyrie like 20 years ago and they went on a top secret stealth mission into Cylon territory and poo poo went bad so Adama just burned him and jumped back to Caprica, and the Cylons captured him and he just now busted out of prison and found the fleet somehow. Adama got punished for cocking up by being reassigned to the Galatica even though the pre-established timeline laid out by the mini-series and multiple known facts about Adama's military career make no sense.

The deets get spilled to Rosland and now everyone thinks that Adama's mission into Cylon territory provoked the Cylons to come and nuke the Colonies, so Adama hands in his resignation, but she tells him to shove it because this kind of has no bearing on literally anything, nor will it have any after this episode. It's sort of waffled about that Lumbly's character might be a brainwashed Cylon Manchurian agent specifically there to execute pre-programmed attacks on the fleet in general and Adama in particular and he goes off because Tigh flat out tells him "Oh yeah, Adama tried to kill you when we left you behind", but that's all resolved with an Old Man Fight between Adama, Tigh, and Bulldog.

The episode ends on Adama going "you should stick around, we could really use your help against the Cylons," and Bulldog's like "yeah, sure, I'll do that." And then he's never seen again.

I don't think there's a single thing that happens in that episode that has any continuity or connective tissue with anything else in the show. You could easily skip it and it would not effect your understanding of the show nor have to grapple with the weird stain it puts on Adama's already pretty great and nuanced character in the name of... I don't know what they were doing, really. Hero sucks, and it only manages to not be the worst episode of the show because The Woman King exists.

nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 09:37 on May 8, 2021

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

nine-gear crow posted:

I don't know what they were doing, really. Hero sucks, and it only manages to not be the worst episode of the show because The Woman King exists.

Black. Market.

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nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





Sanguinia posted:

Black. Market.

Black Market at least has Bill Duke to carry it over the goal line into partway watchable territory. The Woman King is one of the most consistently miserable hours of television I've ever sat through.

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