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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. 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.
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May 5, 2021 09:08
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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 09:51 on May 6, 2021 |
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May 6, 2021 09:45
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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.
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May 7, 2021 07:07
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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.” 
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May 7, 2021 08:20
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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 08:37 on May 8, 2021 |
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May 8, 2021 08:35
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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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May 8, 2021 09:42
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkOjeYY6vxc
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May 8, 2021 23:03
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I've said it elsewhere but between BSG, and the way some of the female Trek characters got written out (K'ehlar being brutally murdered because Ron Moore thought it would be a nice gut punch, Moore being all pissy over Jadzia Dax's death in an interview because he thought that her reaching for her phaser before Dukat kills her was too cliche), I'm kinda suspicious of Ron Moore. It was a theory on SA for years now that Ellen Tigh was an unsubtle vehicle to work out his frustrations with his wife through and whenever she showed up on a commentary track for various episode with Moore there was always an audible tension between the two that made people uncomfortable. They’re still together though, so 
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May 10, 2021 07:23
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Defiance Industries posted:Wasn't everyone on the cruise liner already dead by the time that happened? There were two luxury liners in the fleet. Cloud Nine, which got nuked at the end of Season 2 by Gina, and the ring-shaped habitat ship from Libran. That one made it to Earth but it got turbofucked by the passage through the hell nebula on the way to the algae planet.
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May 15, 2021 00:56
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Arcsquad12 posted:And I'm up to Black Market, just to kill the mood from Pegasus with Fisk getting killed and Lee being a creep to a prostitute and her daughter. 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 
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May 15, 2021 08:32
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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 00:38
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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 06:11
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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 10:10 on May 19, 2021 |
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May 19, 2021 10:07
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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 02:12
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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 10:09
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Tighclops posted:That episode made me hate bill Adama and his dumbass girlfriend I remember once describing Dirty Hands as "Chief Tyrol starts a union... this is presented as a Bad Thing for 90% of the episode."
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Jun 8, 2021 21:05
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I think the article's probably been lost to the sands of time, but I remember reading back in the late 2000s on some website an interview with one (some?) of the show writers, and they said that at some point when they were struggling to make sense of the knots they had tied over the years, Ron Moore had a minor tantrum in the writers' room and basically said "gently caress it, we can just write whatever anyway, it's all about the characters!" Again, I'm not entirely sure what to make of BSG straight up turning into Ron Moore's own ironic hell after basically going "gently caress you, Rick Berman. Voyager sucks the way you did it, so I'm going to make my own Star Trek: Voyager and do it right this time!" And then he plowed the thing right into the ground anyway right alongside Voyager's flaming wreckage.
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Jun 9, 2021 04:01
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MikeJF posted:It wouldn't have even been too hard to pull off the 'abandoning the fleet and tech' ending if they'd leaned a bit harder into galactica falling apart and made it so that they basically had no choice. Drive a bit deeper on all of the ships falling apart, they can barely support life at this point, they've struggled along but they don't have a real manufacturing supply chain, they're basically out of medicine and they can't make more - just make it so that yeah, they limped along for four years but it's over, and they genuinely don't have enough left to build a technological civilisation, and going agrarian is their only choice. The original ending, if I recall correctly, was going to involve Galatica's final jump not just be to Earth, but into Earth's atmosphere and it plummeting to the ground and crashlanding somewhere in South America so that everyone was kind of forced to give up their their tech and stick it out on Earth because the center of their civilization was now a pancaked mess of metal in a crater in the Amazon. The 500,000 year flash forward would have had modern day scientists discovering the Galactica's wreckage on ground penetrating sonar rather than Hera's body as Mitochondrial Eve. I think it was scrapped because the science advisor flat out told them that the crash would not only kill everyone aboard Galactica, but also result in a nuclear winter that would wipe out all life on Earth given Galactica's size and speed upon impact.
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Jun 9, 2021 06:59
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Sanguinia posted:Roslin is absolutely an uncaring monster in this episode, which is par for the course for her in the second half of the show sadly. What the heck happened with her writing? She fell into the Janeway Trap, that black hole along the course of writing a strong female leader character where light bends and can't escape and you start mistaking making hard choices and living with the consequences with just being an unhinged lunatic who never once hesitates to pull the right trigger on the controller whenever the Renegade prompt pops up on screen.
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Jun 9, 2021 09:04
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Arcsquad12 posted:Gaius's season 4 cult harem really reminds me a lot of Dukat's Pah Wraith cult in DS9. Right down to the same colour scheme. RDM definitely pulls more from DS9 in this season up to and including Nana Visitor as a guest star one episode. Nana Visitor was Battlestar Galactica?
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Jun 11, 2021 08:10
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Fate Accomplice posted:it's been a decade since I've watched BSG and I still have a question: I think it's either Baltar or Boomer trying to rebel against her sleeper agent programming. It was probably Baltar though. Like others have said, it doesn't even matter in the end.
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Jun 17, 2021 07:38
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Horizon Burning posted:as a whole the final five were a bad decision I've been told that this is apparently the weirdest possible take one can come up with in regards to this show instead of being an easily chartable delineating point for the show's drop in quality and narrative collapse. What a curious claim to stalk--I mean stake.
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Jun 18, 2021 09:01
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Arcsquad12 posted:Regardless of how bad the writing got the show was buoyed by strong performances. Even at its nadir in the dog days of season 3 and most of season 4 every cast member gives it their all to sell the likes they're given. And they do a drat good job of convincing you that what you’re watching is actually worth watching. Them and Bear McCreary’s score. The scene of Tigh walking into the launch tube later to be joined by Tyrol and Anders while Starbuck is trying to get the Viper to hone in on Earth* and D’Anna’s about to nuke the fleet wouldn’t have been anywhere near as memorable if “The Signal” hadn’t been a part of it. https://youtu.be/CIvppNWZUtc This song could make waiting in line at the DMV seem like a life or death turning point. So it always makes me smile whenever I see BSG actors turning up in other stuff or find out that Bear McCreary is doing the music for something. Except for Nicki Clyne, the sex cult thing kind of ruins everything.
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Jun 18, 2021 16:44
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Arcsquad12 posted:Onto Sine Qua Non in Season 4. I'm barely watching these episodes and just sort of flowing through them. That poor model ship, I hope this one was a replica and not the thousand dollar antique Olmos trashed back on season 3. It would not at all surprise me if they wound up having to just buy the model ship to payout the insurance company and museum it was on loan from and kept its wreckage around on set as an albatross to hang around Eddie's neck for breaking it.
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Jun 19, 2021 05:48
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Arcsquad12 posted:Lol they made the BC coastline depressing af. Clearly you have never been to Vancouver in November to March. They didn't need to dress it up all that much 
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Jun 20, 2021 04:55
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Arcsquad12 posted:Just put a grey filter on it the wreckage was already there. lol no grey filter needed, the weather takes care of that by itself
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Jun 20, 2021 06:56
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Arcsquad12 posted:Onto the mutiny arc. Gaeta represents the audience by that point in the show: wounded and numb and just looking for any way out of the torment that he can find and finally loving elated when it finds him instead.
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Jun 21, 2021 08:36
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Arcsquad12 posted:before you realize that the last piece of BSG material is actually The Plan which is a two hour long bottle episode where Edward James Olmos just films people's dicks in the shower Ahem. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Jun 25, 2021 |
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Jun 25, 2021 22:10
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Also the only part of The Plan that's worth anything is that scene at the end between Tyrol and Gianna, and that final scene where the Cavils are being frogmarched to the airlock and they run into a crowd in the hallway that very pointedly includes Tyrol, Anders, Tory, Saul and Ellen and is like "you know what... gently caress this poo poo. Bring on the tube!"
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Jun 25, 2021 22:13
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Instead of BSG ending on the reprise of Cavil's "I'm a machine... and I can be so much more" monologue, it should have just been the ghostly refrain of Eddie's gravely voice going "Zoom in on the cock!" over and over again as it all fades to black. The End.
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Jun 25, 2021 22:18
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Arcsquad12 posted:Mr. Hoshi: the most non-character character who became became frigging Admiral during the finale. Because literally everyone else was dead. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jun 28, 2021 |
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Jun 28, 2021 16:38
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sad question posted:Should have made Hot Dog an admiral. Isn’t that just nepotism? 
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Jun 28, 2021 19:38
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Maybe it's just the power of Kate Vernon's acting bringing a toxic charisma to the role, but I kind love what a beautiful unapologetic fiery trashmess Ellen Tigh is, both pre- and post-resurrection. Post-resurrection Ellen is like this transcendent otherworldly sage who has all the answers to everything... and is still an absolute trash fire disaster of a person. It's just 
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Jun 30, 2021 00:10
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Maybe not, but they're not obligated to respond in kind either. Eh, by that point Adama and Roslin considered wiping out every Cylon that wasn't Athena and Caprica Six to be more of a personal bonus than an obligation
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Jul 8, 2021 01:05
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Arcsquad12 posted:Isn't that also the Cylon baby blood cures cancer episode? It's also the "We wasted Colm Feore on this" episode AND the "We don't know how to write a B-Plot for Roslin that doesn't also involve a man so she's just loving her old boss via flashbacks" episode.
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Jul 17, 2021 07:46
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sad question posted:They threw darts at the board during s3 to choose final five. This is true. They put the main non-Cylon casts' headshots on a wall and started flinging darts and I think when Tigh was picked they immediately went "Ellen too." And that's basically how we got the Final Five. It was almost kind of shocking how slapdash the show was under the hood. Like literal duct tape, bubble gum, and the prayers of small children level poo poo.
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Aug 15, 2021 23:53
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Sanguinia posted:Wasn't Racetrack one of the biggest of all the Cylon Racists to the point that she joined Gaeda's coup just because she wanted to murder anyone who didn't want to murder Cylons? One would think she'd find Helo repulsive. For what it’s worth, you can barely tell it’s a thing in the show. Especially because Racetrack tends to blip in and out of existence whenever the show doesn’t need her for anything. Her and her ESO getting pardoned and then immediately taking a micro meteoroid to the chest in the final battle was loving hilarious.
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Aug 18, 2021 05:54
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sad question posted:Regarding "the plan", or lack thereof, it was disappointing that cylons basically make poo poo up as they go along (much like writers). But at the same time, it makes certain amount of sense since they are a very young species and society. Individual cylons are still grappling with their strong emotions like they're going through robo puberty. Despite appearance of unity the number groups vary strongly in their world views (especially religion) and approaches to life. Not to mention, there's an entire faction of Cavils that manipulate others for their own gain. Yeah, Cavil had something resembling a plan, as provided to the audience by various hamfisted retcons, and the others were just flailing about as they tried to follow his incredibly vague and lovely lead and it was clear he was willing to throw them all under the bus if they became inconvenient for him. So really THE PLAN was just Cavil going "I'm going to kill everyone who's not me because I'm mad that I exist." And everyone else, human and Cylon alike slowly going "...Huh?"
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Aug 18, 2021 20:50
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Data Graham posted:“The Woman King” is a rough watch in these trying times Part of me almost appreciates like how every single person in The Woman King is a complete rear end in a top hat. It's not funny in the least bit, but it's the closest BSG veers into becoming an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in terms of awful people all knowingly perpetrating awful things on one another for zero appreciable net gain. It feels like a spec script written by someone who didn't watch or at the very least understand what the show was about and who the characters were and it got made because lol writers strike, the gently caress you gonna do? Everything else in the slush pile is just Starbuck/Apollo porn fanfic. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Aug 20, 2021 |
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Aug 20, 2021 05:20
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Arc Hammer posted:I've never sat down to watch all of Rick and Morty and I just catch episodes here and there, so I was rather surprised and amused when James Callis and Tricia Helfer showed up at their daughter's wedding to Bird Man dressed exactly like Head Baltar and Head Six. I appreciate the twist at the end where they're both just murder robots. Very on-brand.
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Aug 21, 2021 22:30
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