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nine-gear crow posted:And that's what sucks too--because Fisk's death is plot-relevant and starts the dominoes falling that leads to Lee in command of Pegasus, you can't skip it like lesser relevant season 2 and 3 episodes. You have to watch Lee be a weird creep and then flash back to that other time he was a weird creep because that's serialized storytelling baby It really sucks because Epiphanies and Black Market are back to back with one another after Resurrection Ship and they're both crap that either do some insane character assassination or they introduce baffling poo poo that makes no sense to set up later plotlines. Like, I think Lee's tragic "girlfriend leaves him because he doesn't want a baby and then the cylons attacked" backstory was made up entirely for this episode and is never mentioned again all series long. Meanwhile they toy with the Lee and Dee relationship (which gets expanded in another stupid episode when Billy dies) and it's like, gently caress RDM, make up your mind. Two poo poo bottle episodes back to back. At least Scar is up next. Meanwhile Epiphanies has Roslin sleeping with the previous president, the insane "let's use mutant baby cells to cure cancer!" and Baltar GIVING A loving NUKE TO A CYLON and her idiot sympathizers who don't recognize her as a cylon for some reason. And all that because he got pissy at Roslin's letter to him that wasn't all that rude the way the show made it out to be. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 18:06 on May 15, 2021 |
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May 15, 2021 17:27
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Scar is still excellent. Probably my favourite episode of season 2. Sacrifice is loving dumb. Billy's death is forgotten before the episode even finishes. Dee and Lee are both awful.
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May 16, 2021 01:50
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:I guess getting a PhD is really hard in BSG universe. Everyone is like “doctor Baltar” as if it meant something, and I feel like there are dozens of dorks with PhDs that I know who are just regular people that happen to work in academia. Seems like his entire deal is being the guy who is obsessed with making sure everyone calls him doctor because of the massive chip on his shoulder
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May 16, 2021 04:17
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Tighclops posted:This is ultimately why the mutiny was justified On another hand Adama and Roslin smoke a big loving blunt so they are a land of contrasts.
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May 16, 2021 09:45
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Finished The Captain's Hand so I took a break from season 2 to watch Razor since it happens next. This movie is nonstop flashbacks and it's infuriating. It doesn't help that three of the last five episodes I watched before this one all involved flashbacks and nonlinear storytelling but it's absolutely everywhere in Razor. You can't go five minutes without a character making a cryptic statement that triggers a flashback. The story itself is just an excuse to make an extended reference to Homeworld, which is appreciated, but the rest of it feels like a substandard episode and it is very cheap looking. They never had many Pegasus sets so they gussied up some of Galactica's hallway with extra lights and reused the maintenance deck with no changes at all. It's a frustrating watch. It also has all the problems of a TV movie where you introduce a new character who is super important and then never mentioned again because the movie came out after the season where they would be relevant. Shaw is just a other in the long list of dead Pegasus officers who get introduced and dumped because they're not Galactica regulars. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 23:14 on May 16, 2021 |
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May 16, 2021 23:01
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Arcsquad12 posted:Scar is still excellent. Probably my favourite episode of season 2. The actor who played Billy wanted off the show because he felt his character was just a dead-end role that they were never going to do anything with, so they had to scramble to kill him off. And then they went and made his replacement character a Final Five Cylon and gave her a relatively decent transhuman insanity arc in the final episodes and Rekha Sharma has since shown up in a bunch of big name sci-fi stuff from V, to The 100, to Star Trek, whereas I don't think I've ever seen the dude who played Billy anywhere else and can't even remember his name...
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May 17, 2021 01:38
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My favorite part of Black Market is when the hooker asks Lee for "another hundred", even though the whole drat point of the episode is that there is no money, and people are bartering for everything. Even the president's aide had to trade liquor for antibiotics for her staff, as established two minutes earlier. Another hundred what? It's also a missed opportunity because it would have almost redeemed the episode if she had asked for "another one", and Lee had handed her a live chicken or something, without missing a beat. SimonChris fucked around with this message at 09:17 on May 17, 2021 |
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May 17, 2021 06:41
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Finished up Season 2. Lay Down Your Burdens may have set up the New Caprica arc that eventually undid the show, but it's still a decent two parter and Dean Stockwell is the only Cylon having fun. Now I'm watching The Resistance, the mini episodes about Duck on New Caprica. It's kinda funny how this cheap as hell bottle show actually looks better than the main show's New Caprica scenes because they didn't run all the outdoor shots through an ugly washed out filter. Also I found out where I've seen Duck before. He was a child actor on Are You Afraid of the Dark.
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May 19, 2021 02:54
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Just finished watching BSG 1980. And you know what ... yeah it's cheesy and hokey and baffling in places, but I almost think it's required watching to really have an idea what BSG2003 was maybe trying to do. When I went through BSG'78, as I noted earlier, I was kind of blown away by how much of the worldbuilding and texture of the reboot was directly rooted in the original — the Kobol mythology, the 12 Colonies stuff, all the Mormon-template persecuted-pioneer business on the surface to be sure, but also little things like identical clones, numbered Cylon "models", alternative vocabulary for things like units of measurement, the "angels" / Head characters, a nascent cultural aversion to computers, even a fakeout where they land on an Earth-like planet called "Terra" that turns out not to be Earth after all. And those were all from '78. I had sort of assumed that a whole lot of it was newly dreamed-up material, but really what I now know is that the new ideas 2003 came up with — aside from obvious stuff like more female headline characters and updating the whole texture for the post-9/11 world — were relatively minor, like having names like "Apollo" and "Adama" not be the characters' entire proper names, but military callsigns for people with names like "William" and "Sharon". And polytheism. And cutting the corners off paper. What I didn't realize, though, was that the 2003 creators paid just as much attention to 1980 as they did to '78, because some of the most startling developments of the original's storytelling didn't come up until then. That's where you got things like the idea of "next-gen" Cylons who look like humans, and a whole lot of revelatory thinking about the nature of Cylons in what ended up being the final episode, "The Return of Starbuck". That's where they stick Starbuck on a deserted planet with a crashed centurion prisoner and they grudgingly befriend each other, with a lot of one-on-one speeches to each other about what Cylons want with the universe and how they view humans and so on. What's especially weird is how despite all the monotone BY YOUR COMMAND stuff up to that point in the series, the Cylon doesn't seem to have any difficulty speaking in modulated tones or understanding emotion, or indeed feeling it as intensely as humans do. There's surprisingly little of the expected "I am a machine beep boop what is this thing called love". Well, no, there's plenty of it, but then the next minute he's pouting and smacking his robot fists on the table in frustration at being sidelined as Starbuck's best friend, or making sarcastic, even witty jokes at Starbuck's expense. I don't really even know how to engage with it, it's so odd for the genre; I can't tell whether it's way more nuanced than it had any right being, or just really lazy and undisciplined writing that just kind of treats the Cylon as another human half the time, reacting exactly the way a human would. But either way it definitely was what the BSG2003 creators seemed to have freshest in their minds, because the episode's story centered around a mysterious woman who the Cylon finds out on the planet somewhere (turns out she's an angel) who attaches herself to Starbuck and gives birth to a star child (with Starbuck as the "father" and the Cylon as the godfather) who they ship back alone to Galactica to be their savior. And Starbuck dies alone, surrounded by Cylon corpses, contemplating eternity on the planet. In other words the whole BSG2003 last season and finale, incoherent and maddening as it was, seems to have been if anything an all-but-faithful adaptation of BSG1980, with all the weirdness and internal contradictions well and truly intact. All in all the show is tragically cheap-looking and full of cheats and stock TV plots, but there's a lot of really interesting writing and dialogue in it that seemed to have been envisioned for a much grander presentation. No wonder they wanted to remake it. But then what it makes me feel is that BSG2003, with its determinedly modern-Earth-military-like texture and present-day American human names for the characters, actually kind of loses a lot of the otherworldly mystique, and even starts to feel like some kind of artsy modern gimmick retelling, like that Romeo & Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio where all the swords are replaced with guns with like "Rapier" engraved on them and the messenger is a FedEx guy. I've been reading that there is talk of yet another reboot being bandied about, and now that I've seen the original (I'm gonna go through 2003 again soon probably), I can sort of imagine why they'd want to; a remake more in the style and spirit of the original, where people wear robes instead of Marine fatigues and such, but where they keep the polytheism and constellation stuff and play up the racial-memory business in a more consistent and convincing way than the original did, could really be the best of both worlds. Data Graham fucked around with this message at 16:11 on May 19, 2021 |
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May 19, 2021 04:08
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As long as it ends better than the 2003 show. What a trash pile ending. BSG 78 had a good ending. It wasn't a conclusive ending but leaving it on a hopeful note with the faint signal that there was something, maybe something out there, that could be home was a satisfying way to end a show that wasn't guaranteed to be a success.
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May 19, 2021 06:05
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Arcsquad12 posted:As long as it ends better than the 2003 show. What a trash pile ending. We've kind of run the gammut on endings now with regard to Earth (03: millions of years in the past, 1980: modern times, 73: *shrug*), so the next reboot that Universal is trying to get off the ground may very well end with either a hyper advanced future Earth vis-a-vis the Colonials or some weird esoteric metaphysical option. If it even happens, I mean. Seems like it's been stuck in development hell for a couple years now.
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May 19, 2021 07:11
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Its been years since ive seen the 03 series but why do people love Scar so much? It doesn't even make sense. All the cylons die and get resurrected but apparently only this one ship ever bothers to learn anything from it to be a better pilot? Huh? Scar cant communicate advanced space combat tactics or whateverthefuck to other ships? With all the raiders they kill over the series shouldn't there be like entire squadrons of red baron raiders?
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May 19, 2021 10:57
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banned from Starbucks posted:Its been years since ive seen the 03 series but why do people love Scar so much? It doesn't even make sense. All the cylons die and get resurrected but apparently only this one ship ever bothers to learn anything from it to be a better pilot? Huh? Scar cant communicate advanced space combat tactics or whateverthefuck to other ships? With all the raiders they kill over the series shouldn't there be like entire squadrons of red baron raiders? Scar happens a couple episodes after they take out the Resurrection Ship, so every Cylon model and Raider out where Galactica is now dies permanently when they’re taken out. So the reason Scar is so dangerous is because it can’t rely on resurrection tech any more and just hop into an infinite number of new Raider bodies without care, it has to learn from its mistakes now, or it’s dead and never coming back. So it starts doing things no other Raider does like planning ambushes, actively loving with the Colonial pilots, and holding extremely murderous grudges. When Scar dies, that’s it, it’s gone, all its memories and experiences go poof because no other Cylon ship is in range to download it nor did the Cylons even know it was out there at that point. The Raiders go back to their normal status quo after that because it turns out there’s more Resurrection Ships out there, so the whole victory of Pegasus/Resurrection Ship, Part I/II was ultimately meaningless until Season 4 when they blow up the central hub of the resurrection network and cripple the tech once and for all. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 11:10 on May 19, 2021 |
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May 19, 2021 11:07
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Watched the first three part chapter of 1978. It is much more somber than I remember from having seen it as a child. Also, Boxy and his robot dog are no longer my favorite characters. It's also much better than I expected in terms of character development, writing, and especially special effects. The space scenes rip off Star Wars completely and competently just a year after the first movie was released. They hold up better than, say, costumes or the terrible cheap scenography on that one planet.
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May 19, 2021 13:21
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Scar is also heavily implied to be the same raider that Starbuck shot down and then gutted during Act of Contrition / You Can't Go Home Again so he has it out for her in particular. Starbucks is at her lowest point during that episode where she's falling apart, letting her alcoholism get the better of her and generally wanting to die, so it sets up the dichotomy between a vengeful raider who wants to live against a broken pilot who is suicidal. Scar owns.
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May 19, 2021 14:57
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Watching BSG2003 for the first time since it was new, and I'm kind of surprised at how clearly I remember it. The CGI sure seemed better at the time though. And wow the video quality is grainy, but I guess I have to remember HDTV was still pretty new. Things that I am surprised by, after having just seen '78/80: they're even less pervasive with the alternative vocabulary than I'd remembered. They use terms like "hours" and "years" and "coffee" and "attorney", all things that had "alien" versions in the original. They even repeatedly say "oh my God" even though the whole idea of monotheism being the Cylons' kooky cult was there right from the start. Not sure if that's sloppiness or something that's supposed to be laid at the feet of the "yes hello this is the US on a fall Tuesday in 2001" cultural context they're operating in. (Adama's speech at the decommissioning ceremony where he takes responsibility on humans' shoulders for having created the Cylons and refused to self-examine all their sins, I do remember, came across to my lovely-libertarian roommates as the 2003 equivalent of "woke mob pandering"/"virtue signalling".) Right off the bat I'm just completely taken with all the characters. As weird and off-puttingly strutting as Starbuck was in the original, Kara Thrace is utterly fascinating and lights up every scene. Pissy arrogant Lee is great once we understand why he's so annoyed at having to be there. Tigh the past-it put-upon drunk is great from the word go and I know he'll only get better. Baltar is slimy and hateable for reasons entirely unlike the moustache-twirling cackling supervillain of '78; just a wretched coward with nothing but wet pants after his playboy life and celebrity status is stripped away, yet he still goes back again and again to the horny well. Just uggghh and brilliantly framed for what the new archetype for a terrible person in the 2000s is. And Adama is the grandpa captain you can actually talk to, Picard without the pride. After 30 minutes in this universe you want to just stay in it for as long as you can. I noticed in the credits that Richard Gibbs did the music. Bear McCreary wasn't really involved until the series proper got started, I guess? I can see there's some reading up to be done here. Anyway I do really like how the use of taiko-style drums is the closest thing to an ongoing theme there is. Really sets things apart nicely and does more to establish the "alien" backdrop than a lot of the on-screen texture does, since it's again so deliberately closer to modern-Earth language and iconography than the original was. What I didn't think I knew was that Glenn Larson got co-writing and "consulting producer" credit on the script. Was he really that involved? I wonder what that was like, how much total reimagining of things he was party to. Like did he think some stuff from '78 was dumb and he wanted to do it better? What new ideas were his? How much of the reining-in of the original's alien ideas was he even aware of? Surely his style wasn't much suited to the new thing, but I'm kind of interested in things like how a person grows and changes their creative output and abilities as they develop over time.
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May 21, 2021 02:16
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The colonials worship the Greek pantheon but even ancient Greeks worshipped some gods over others so the Kobol inhabitants use Oh My God/Gods interchangeably. I can't remember how much Larson was involved with the show itself but he did have to sign off on the miniseries so he got a credit. Richard Hatch was notably very upset he hadn't been approached for the miniseries despite the efforts he'd made in the 80s and 90s to do a reboot of the show. When the miniseries got greenlit for a full series RDM had more pull and they brought Hatch in as a new character Tom Zarek.
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May 21, 2021 02:28
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Yeah, I did read about the Hatch stuff. His continuation would have been pretty interesting to see, it looked like a 100% lookalike from the photos I'd found, of things like the flight jackets and such. Another thing I'm reminded now that 2003 did very well was setting up the Cylon space battles to be just overwhelmingly, maddeningly one-sided, in favor of the Cylons. Like you see one Cylon on your scope and poo poo is well and truly going down. The original had so many cookie-cutter dogfights (all using the same model shots over and over of course) that looked like arcade shooting-galleries, after a couple of them you got the feeling the Cylons were piloted by total buffoons and their only strength was in numbers and basestars. It really segued nicely into the shrieking tension of 33, where just the thought of "oh gently caress they found us" was basically tantamount to the whole game being over, barring some miracle. That the show managed to keep those heart-pounding stakes so high for so long is quite a feat.
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May 21, 2021 02:38
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Arcsquad12 posted:The colonials worship the Greek pantheon but even ancient Greeks worshipped some gods over others so the Kobol inhabitants use Oh My God/Gods interchangeably. And on the inverse side of that spectrum, Dirk Benedict was initially very supportive of the show and the casting of Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck, even taking her out for lunch to commemorate it, and then turned suddenly, violently against the show and Sackhoff as a part of his descent into right wing assholery and any connection he had to the new show was quickly disappeared by the powers that be.
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May 21, 2021 03:12
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"Thank you, Captain Apollo, for saving our collective ASSSES" Man I'd forgotten how great Roslin was as a character coming out of nowhere with no archetypes but like, Janeway to follow. And I also remember how there was all this after-the-fact discussion of whether her faltering speech during the inauguration on Colonial One was just an act because she's so conniving and evil, but it sure did look convincing in the context of the moment. Anyway random question but what the hell was it with child actors where up until some point in like, the 90s, they were absolutely, uniformly, abominable? And then one day you had Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Haley Joel Osment and suddenly you could expect kids on screen to act and behave like actual human beings instead of trained seals? Were acting schools for kids something that was only invented in like 1985 or something?
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May 21, 2021 23:04
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I believe it has to do with the laws involving child actors and how long they're allowed to be on set each day. TV production is done on a very tight schedule and it's even tighter with children and all the legal restrictions studios have to abide by, so that's why you often get stuck with poor child performances. There just isn't enough time to get the best takes. The other part of it has to do with directors not knowing how to direct children. Spielberg is a master at getting the proper emotional responses out of child actors for his movies, but not everyone is Spielberg. What you start to see in the 90s is more kids going into acting at a young age and schools really focusing on teaching acting for the screen rather than just stage productions for parent night. There's a market for child actors so the cottage industry of prepping them for screen roles developed over time. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 23:26 on May 21, 2021 |
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May 21, 2021 23:17
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Trying to think back to what specifically made this feel so "in the moment" right after 9/11, and the second half of the miniseries really goes hard on the existential questions that seemed so relevant at the time - There are sleeper agents Among Us who are sus (and if you suspect them and throw them in Gitmo unjustifiably, don't worry, because at the end it will turn out that you were right all along and they WERE in fact enemy agents, SIKE) - Roslin's position of "we should run, yes absolutely, exactly that, run" was another one of those lines that sounded like it was something you were supposed to hate her for saying, and Adama's dick-swinging "we stand and fight" denial that the war is over and lost is supposed to sound like the good and honorable angle; but then they DO run, because it's the only choice, and you're left going "well so what are you telling me, that the craven and cowardly weak limp-wristed womanly decision to retreat is what we should be doing? gently caress that" - And then following the So Say We All speech, Roslin and Adama have another heart-to-heart where we learn that the whole story of Earth is, as far as anyone knows, a lie — and the show takes the Adama tack that chasing an honorable lie is better than surrendering to a painful truth. Because it Gives the People Hope At the time I know we were all supposed to read it as "history is ugly and bad, but dammit, it's OUR history, and you can't take it away from us no matter how you try or how right you may be". In hindsight it reads like bare naked propaganda, even though all the other existential questions posed to the audience up to that point have been trying to lead us to at least imagine there might be another way to think. It's like "Okay, yes it really sucks to have to racially profile people and assume that everyone with a weird sounding last name is a risk to blow up a plane, but dammit we are at war for our lives here, and 85 lives is a noble sacrifice to save 50,000, especially if they are the LAST 50,000" Christ this feels bleak in retrospect. Anyway — - The plot point about Zak failing his flight tests and having to be passed through due to nepotism and/or help from his girlfriend, I had to look up to make sure it wasn't a by-the-numbers pastiche of the Killian documents. But no, that happened a year later, WTF  - I appreciate that they gave Starbuck the big stogie as a nod to the previous iteration - Holy hell the shaky cam. Are we sure Michael Bay wasn't involved? But more than that, we get this directorial technique (especially toward the end of the miniseries) of intercutting between two or more scenes/conversations happening at the same time in the same general area, with the camera swooping around and between them and the focus shifting from one in the foreground to the other in the background and back, and pulling them from wildly disparate places together into a single coherent narrative line, i.e. "We have to start having babies". "Uhhhh, is that an order?" Lmao. But I'm recalling that this was just a few short years after Babylon 5 and DS9/Voyager ended, which were the state of the art at the time, and this kind of near-experimental filmmaking in a TV context was like a world-shattering breakthrough compared to what we were used to.
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May 22, 2021 01:14
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BSG was the Game of Thrones genre TV zeitgeist of the 2000s for a reason.
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May 22, 2021 01:20
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Olmos even gave a speech at a UN related thing and got the audience doing the so say we all thing
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May 22, 2021 01:25
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Oh yeah — and something I noticed was that Roslin has a speech to Billy where she says "the world is ending, and all I can think about is that I have cancer and am going to die". This is juxtaposed against Baltar, who as I said earlier is being set up as a new kind of Bad Person for the 2000s: the completely self-absorbed comfortable coward who will venally sell out his entire Roslin isn't as bad as Baltar, but she's on the same vector. Ambiguous at best. She's not trying to enrich herself, she's just trying to survive. She's even proven right strategically. But she's still not as good as Adama, morally. Adama's stance is self-sacrifice, and in 2003 that meant Good Guy. To be willing to compromise your principles in order to survive, or do what might today be called self-care, is to be a Bad Guy. It would have taken a better person than me to watch this poo poo live and not be swayed by it into some really lovely worldviews and behavior Data Graham fucked around with this message at 01:41 on May 22, 2021 |
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May 22, 2021 01:38
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Thats a thing I really love about the show even into its weaker seasons. Nobody is unambiguously good or bad, even amoral shitbags like Baltar. They're flawed beings constantly juggling self interest and morality against the immense pressure of staving off extinction and the show challenges their convictions at every turn. Sometimes the moral challenges are a little more on the nose than others. Roslin especially is dynamic because while she is ultimately a "good" person she has a ruthless mean streak and she is more than willing to hide her personal beliefs behind the mythical persona as the Shepherd of Humanity. Multiple times in the series there are characters that take her kindness at face value and get burned. Her dynamic with Sharon, Helo and Hera is relentlessly cruel and yet she takes responsibility for her actions regardless rather than pass them onto someone else. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 02:03 on May 22, 2021 |
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May 22, 2021 01:59
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Yeah Baltar's fascinating — he's not even making a cold calculated "this is in my best interest" kind of decision at any point, he's genuinely horrified when he realizes what he's done through allowing himself to be flattered into giving up state defense secrets. He does try to hold out as best he can against Six who, frankly, makes a good case for why he should keep listening to her, even for humanity's sake, because it sounds like she might be telling him something useful, giving him actionable clues, even maybe sowing dissent against other Cylons. When he comes up with the "Cylon detector" idea he's just shooting from the hip and making poo poo up on the fly and it somehow works because that's just what everyone wants to hear. He hates himself for it but it works and what else can he do but go along? What good would it do anyone, even discounting himself, to tell anyone a different story? You even empathize with him from the audience because you think "could I, honestly, in his exact position, do literally anything else?"
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May 22, 2021 02:55
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Data Graham posted:Yeah Baltar's fascinating — he's not even making a cold calculated "this is in my best interest" kind of decision at any point, he's genuinely horrified when he realizes what he's done through allowing himself to be flattered into giving up state defense secrets. He does try to hold out as best he can against Six who, frankly, makes a good case for why he should keep listening to her, even for humanity's sake, because it sounds like she might be telling him something useful, giving him actionable clues, even maybe sowing dissent against other Cylons. When he comes up with the "Cylon detector" idea he's just shooting from the hip and making poo poo up on the fly and it somehow works because that's just what everyone wants to hear. He hates himself for it but it works and what else can he do but go along? What good would it do anyone, even discounting himself, to tell anyone a different story? You even empathize with him from the audience because you think "could I, honestly, in his exact position, do literally anything else?" Baltar was always a personal favorite of mine because there are times in those early seasons when he really seems to be trying to be helpful and is certainly filled with grief over what he's done. Helo sacrificing his place on the escape ship for him clearly stuck with him. But then his own cowardice and narcissism and fear of discovery of what he'd done always manages to put him right back into a lovely place, and then he COMPLAINS ABOUT IT. He feels bad about everything and attempts to do good but he never internalizes that he deserves punishment or that he ought to change who he is, and that makes for a very unique character. I remember when Tighs Wife got revealed as one of the Final Cylons I thought back to the Cylon test and how Baltar says she comes up negative, but then reminds us that EVERYONE comes up negative and that he'll never tell anyone what the real result says, and thinking what a spectacular piece of poo poo this man was to know she was a Cylon for literal years and never fess up that he invented a working test and then just LIED about all the results for fear what a Cylon Agent might do to him if he exposed them. Then I remembered that things he said later made it not make sense for him to know Ellen Tigh (or for that matter Col. Tigh since he surely tested him as well) was a Cylon so he must have just broke his own test after he ID'd Boomer. But the point is I totally believed that he'd just kept it to himself for all that time. And him breaking the working test to protect his own rear end is another special form of shittiness that only Baltar is truly capable of.
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May 22, 2021 04:19
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When I first saw "Bastille Day" however many years ago I knew Richard Hatch was someone from the original show, but it was kind of lost on me what the framing was doing, putting him one-on-one with Lee for a whole episode, and having a philosophical discussion about the name "Apollo" even. And then the episode ending with Roslin saying to Lee, "You're Captain Apollo!  "Nice gesture. And it's cool seeing how much Hatch had matured as an actor, working with more modern, verité type dialogue instead of the space-opera stuff from '78.
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May 25, 2021 01:30
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Sanguinia posted:I remember when Tighs Wife got revealed as one of the Final Cylons I thought back to the Cylon test and how Baltar says she comes up negative, but then reminds us that EVERYONE comes up negative and that he'll never tell anyone what the real result says, and thinking what a spectacular piece of poo poo this man was to know she was a Cylon for literal years and never fess up that he invented a working test and then just LIED about all the results for fear what a Cylon Agent might do to him if he exposed them. Then I remembered that things he said later made it not make sense for him to know Ellen Tigh (or for that matter Col. Tigh since he surely tested him as well) was a Cylon so he must have just broke his own test after he ID'd Boomer. But the point is I totally believed that he'd just kept it to himself for all that time.
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May 25, 2021 02:15
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I'm onto Hero now. Hero still sucks but it's unfortunately required viewing to get Saul out of his depressive funk. At least Michael Hogan nails his scenes. Now onto Unfinished Business. The extended cut is better than the broadcast version but it didn't need to be 90 minutes long. While I do appreciate several of the added scenes, a lot of the existing scenes that got extended are worse and the editing for some of them is really jarring (particularly Roslin and Adama having a quiet moment talking during the fight immediately cutting to the broadcast footage of Roslin yelling at the top of her lungs how she's always been a boxing fan). This is also the episode that cements Lee as being The Worst. He's been a creepy weirdo since the episode where he got shot by Starbuck during the hostage crisis but this episode is the one that really seals it with his behavior in the flashbacks and in the present. Dee gets shafted hard and it only gets worse for her from now on. Not that she's squeaky clean either considering how she screwed over Billy. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 05:44 on May 26, 2021 |
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May 26, 2021 02:56
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The more I watch through S1 now, with the new perspective of having seen the original, the more I continue to be struck by the idea that this isn't a show about ancient alien humans' origin story and gods and monsters and all that, as much as it is just a military show with some funny vocabulary dribbled in. They really wanted to do a show about ranks and duties and hazing and careers and YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH scenes, it seems.
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May 26, 2021 12:21
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Data Graham posted:the more I continue to be struck by the idea that this isn't a show about ancient alien humans' origin story and gods and monsters and all that, Lol just wait a few seasons. Also holy hell it you look at the title crawls for each episode over 6000 people died either as a result of Cloud 9 exploding or during the subsequent year on New Caprica before the Cylons showed up. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 13:49 on May 26, 2021 |
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May 26, 2021 13:41
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My favourite Baltar phase is when he becomes a marxist revolutionary and writes a manifesto with a pen hidden in his rear end.Arcsquad12 posted:Lol just wait a few seasons.
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May 26, 2021 16:44
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So I found out BSG is on Peacock randomly and I've been watching it in the background for about a week. S1 was a lot better than I remembered and so is S2.0. The best part of the show has definitely been the parallel stories of Boomer slowly losing her grip on reality and desperately trying to hold onto her life and loved ones despite her sleeper agent programming and Athena awakening to her love for Helo and betraying the other Cylons for his sake. Its incredibly compelling television. Seeing all of Boomers little victories turn to ash in her mouth when she shoots Adama and then her death in Tyrol's arms is just soul-crushing stuff, and makes you root for Athena and Helo to overcome the obstacles in their way that much more which makes her moments in Home Part 2 and Flight of the Phoenix that much more emotionally satisfying. The only part of it that struck me as weird was when Athena takes off and strands Helo and Starbuck, it never gets any kind of explanation of justification, not even a token statement from Athena that she felt like Starbuck would have killed her if she'd stayed or something. It just kind of hangs there forgotten even as Starbuck kind of warms up to her despite herself. Frankly Starbuck unintentionally warming up to Athena even as much as she does kind of strains credulity after what happened to her during The Farm even if Athena helped rescue her, but Starbuck is a weirdo with a hosed up worldview so it doesn't shatter disbelief or anything. The entire Farm subplot should have probably been cut frankly, its not the worst idea on paper that the Cylons need humans to reproduce but they're so bigoted and afraid that they need to go to these extremes of control that betray their society's hosed up nature, but in practice it just doesn't seem worth it, especially since they felt the need to have Athena offer a weird attempt at justifying the practice (although admittedly she delivers the line in such a way that you could buy her not really believing the propaganda and its more a sad, desperate attempt at compartmentalization so she can cope with what monters her people are being). The show really reaches a high-point with Pegasus and Resurrection Ship, its maybe the three best hours of Scifi Action-Thriller TV I've seen in years. The emotional roller-coaster and the themes of what war does to people and the question of why human beings are worth saving (because we are capable of redemption and forgiveness for even the most horrific sins) are fantastically realized. Baltar, Head Six, Captive Six, Stabuck, Apollo, Adama, Roslin, Cain, Tyrol, Helo and Athena all play their parts amazingly, bouncing back and forth against each other both literally and thematically, creating this incredibly symphony of meaning to the larger story that ALMOST never misses a note. Ironically I think the moment that Admiral Cain was shot was the moment the series took a stark downhill turn. It was an uncharacteristically conservative, arguably even cowardly move to preserve the status quo of the show which undermined the entire message of the story, that even someone like Admiral Cain who had done all of these unspeakable atrocities was not so far gone that she was irredeemable. In the larger scheme of the entire show's themes, Cain backing down from crossing that line is arguably the moment that primes the audience to consider the possibility that the Cylons should not be beyond redemption for the nuclear holocaust they visited on humanity, which is crucial not just for the particular story of Athena as a person but for the revelations in Downloaded a couple episodes away. So having Cain die before she can even begin walking the path of atonement for her actions strikes me as a move really lacking in vision, especially since having Captive Six just kill her as revenge for being victimized only to then do... basically nothing until her death a few episodes later. She foments this dissident Cylon Peace Terrorist movement, she has this weird "relationship," with Gaius that really does a lot of harm to his character and makes it seem like he only helped her with her trauma because he wanted to gently caress her, and then she blows herself up to... intentionally attract the other Cylons when they'd said earlier the same episode they were done chasing the humans? Or just to kill herself? Who knows? Like, from the moment Cain died the show seems to have lost all narrative coherence at the macro scale, and its freaking weird. Downloaded seems to be the only exception to that, it carries forward the themes of the Pegasus Arc by introducing Cylon's society's ruthlessness is internal as well as external, and using Head Baltar, a soft reboot of Caprica Six's character and the return of Boomer, who is full of piss and vinegar at how everything went down and eager to tell the people who ruined everything she loved to gently caress off, as the vehicles to get us to believe that the Cylons could go through a radical change which might allow them to address their own sins just as the humans did as Cain's crimes were revealed. But considering that the "new," Cylons under Boomer and Six's leadership go on to do this brutal apartheid occupation on New Caprica which only makes both Cylon and Human more monstrous both to themselves and each other, that never really goes anywhere (at grievous cost to Boomer's character by the way, boy does she get thrown in the blender based on what I remember of S3 and 4...). The rest of 2.5 outside of Downloaded does even less with where Resurrection Ship left us in terms of thematic development, its just weird grimdark poo poo with barely anything holding it together, not even consistent serial narrative building like S1 had. Plus what feels like a character assassination for Laura Roslin in the process. Scar and Captain's Hand and Lay Down Your Burdens are great self-contained stories, and there's good individual parts and character stuff in Ephiphanies, Sacrifice and even Black Market, but its such a steep dive it was almost shocking.
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May 28, 2021 06:36
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I've also tried to picture a few times what the back half of the show would have looked like if Cain survived the rest of the show. That said, I think Razor kind of retroactively slams the door on her redeemability as a character by taking away the last shred of plausible deniability from Cain over the Gina rape and torture situation and makes it explicitly clear that she herself ordered it to happen for no other reason than as an act of petty revenge. So Cain ultimately deserved the bullet she wound up eating, yes.
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May 28, 2021 11:09
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nine-gear crow posted:I've also tried to picture a few times what the back half of the show would have looked like if Cain survived the rest of the show. That said, I think Razor kind of retroactively slams the door on her redeemability as a character by taking away the last shred of plausible deniability from Cain over the Gina rape and torture situation and makes it explicitly clear that she herself ordered it to happen for no other reason than as an act of petty revenge. So Cain ultimately deserved the bullet she wound up eating, yes. Given the direction the show ultimately goes in in terms of forgiving the Cylons, both as a species and as individuals, it's worth asking if in the show's moral terms thats really true. In Res Ship Part 2 Head Six rants as Baltar that humans will not be forgiven for the sin of murdering the helpless Cylons on the ship, and when Baltar asks Gina she says that God can forgive anything. It makes her murdering Cain in cathartic revenge for her rape, complete with retroactively ironic one-liner about her ex-lover not being "her type," all the more thematically nonsensical. If the message of the Pegasus trilogy, and indeed all of Season 2.0 leading up to it is about Love, in both the romantic and religious senses, and it's power to redeem, again in both the moral AND religious senses, should we not entertain the possibility that Cain could have found atonement for even her most mortal sin, ordering the infliction of the most horrific degradation on her lover just to make her suffer for a betrayal and deny her basic 'humanity'? I mean, not for nothing but the entire thesis of Razor was that the war itself is what was turning Pegasus into the Ship Of The Damned and it's crew into the titular Razors, that they werent bad people being revealed by hard times, they were good people that circumstance was poisoning. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one for saying rape is a forgivable crime, but then I also am not big on saying nuclear genocide or forced impregnation or psychological torture through forced captivity or any of the other things Cylons did are forgivable crimes. The show stakes out some very bold ground by going all in on religiously-rooted notions of forgiveness and redemption when it comes to the human/cylon conflict so I don't think it needed to balk at including Helena Cain in that sphere.
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May 28, 2021 12:34
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Maybe it would have been too soon or too cliche but Cain rescuing Galactica during the evacuation of new Caprica would have been cool but I guess fat Lee needed it more.
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May 28, 2021 12:44
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Now you have me imagining what a different Season 2 / 3 would have been if Cain had survived getting shot by Gina. She's out of commission Adama-style but when she wakes up she's still Cain but a bit less homicidal and when the fleet decides to settle on New Caprica she takes the Pegasus to keep up the war with the Cylons. Then when the New Caprica arc happens Adama and the Fleet are trying to find her so they can rescue the colonists but she refuses to help, then comes in at the last second having followed the two baseships that came in to encircle galactica after she does the atmospheric jump. Then Cain can go out with a blaze of glory taking her crew of rapists with her.
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May 28, 2021 13:48
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 01:34 |
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Isn’t any crime forgivable? Like if the victim of a crime forgave the perpetrator isn’t it forgiven? It’s all choice, not immutable cosmic law
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May 28, 2021 14:56
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