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A brief retrospective on the Battlestar Galactica reboot:
So I saw the other day that it was the 20th anniversary of the launch of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. This interested me for a few reasons: firstly, I'm getting old. This was the first TV show I was actively a "fan" of, and as a young teenaged boy it was everything I could have wanted. Timing-wise, it aired in the last heyday of the network TV drama: before the writer's strike of 2007-08 that would see the bifurcation of television into cheap reality shows and "prestige" (but relatively little-watched) cable dramas. As such the show ever tries to balance itself between the seriousness of its concept and demands for mass appeal with 20+ episode seasons. But it also served as a sort of test case for the rebooted franchise, a phenomenon you may have observed has become more common in recent years. It is also not dissimilar to the slew of comic book movies in that it took a somewhat childish and cheesy media property aimed at children and "updated" it for adults. So in many respects it's interesting to see it again as a portent of the shape of things to come.
So I sat down and watched the miniseries, and then a bunch of episodes from season 1. It's still great, and although it collapsed into nonsense later in its four season run it's still very much worth a watch. Don't worry about spoilers here, I'm not going to spoil anything, but if you're interested then don't google anything. The characters are rich, the plotlines imaginative, the music might be the best ever composed for the small screen, and the special effects look great (especially for a constrained budget). And when the show fails, it does so trying to swing for the fences... or in an attempt to please network execs.
It's an interesting look back in time from a culture war standpoint, because it is a show very much of its time. It mines pretty heavily the feelings of post-9/11 America (though like almost all low-budget sci-fi, is staffed almost entirely by Canadians). There's an alternating sense of paranoia and simultaneous togetherness that runs through everything. The show muses repeatedly about the nature of overlapping civilian and military governance, and the appropriateness of how either might extend their power given the situation. The Iraq War of course provided inspiration no science fiction show could pass up, but the show generally opted for much more interesting parallels, and ones that you might not expect.
You might not also expect how little the ripped-from-the-headlines controversies resemble the culture wars of today. Take for instance the sex-swap of fan favourite, hotshot pilot "Starbuck", who was now a woman in the rebooted series. This is the sort of thing that has become a rote controversy in current media adaptations; inevitable long youtube rants about "wokeness" and trillion-dollar companies playing the victim ensues. There was a minor, albeit passionate outcry at the time, but was pretty solidly squashed by how well the show pulled it off, in part because the show makes no attempt to treat it as significant or lecture the audience. In fact there's almost no gender-war elements at play in the series, and the only one of note I can remember again does not play out how you might expect. (A bunch of characters were also "race-swapped"; some light googling suggests no one even cared at the time, nor does the show bring up racial politics ever if I recall correctly).
But there also exist parallels that didn't exist at the time: it's pretty impossible to watch it today and not think about it as an exploration of the dangers of AI. Of course, rebelling robots was a hackneyed concept even by the time the original series aired in the 1970s, but the reboot does a good job of imagining the ways superhuman intelligence might rapidly evolve out of our ability to contain or comprehend it.
So do you like sci-fi? Do you like drama? Do you like shows that respect your intelligence and don't treat you like a child, morally or intellectually? Do you like depictions of a military that is not totally incompetent and treats discipline as actually essential? Then hey, give it a shot. Though I understand it can be tricky finding it to stream legally; Amazon or torrents or 123moviestv dot net would be better options, especially because you want to start with the miniseries before season 1, episode 1.
I have consistently found going back and watching the sci-fi of my youth that it is way more preachy about the progressive ideas of its time than I thought. DS9 is photon torpedoes full spread at traditional religious beliefs(which is especially clumsy because the Bajoran gods are real), Jack O'Neill is a peacenik xenophile who sneers with open contempt at Christian Republican Senator.
I don't think they were as bad as modern shows are today, but it is still consistently surprising to me how often and sometimes heavy handed political messaging was in these shows that I was totally oblivious to when I mostly agreed with the politics/hadn't been primed to notice.
I have to disagree about O'Neill. SG-1 manages to pull off that rare accomplishment of sometimes being about politics without ever being political. They never say what party Kinsey is from, from what I remember, and the 1990s were a time where his type was available in both parties to be disdained.
The way in which they have Jack handle Daniel's actually peacenik attitudes (even if Daniel is right by plot fiat) is also a bit of a conservative stereotype of the gruff, worldly military man running rough shod over the lefty ivory tower type. The way they handled their relationship (where both get to be right and wrong at different times and both get to be both positive and negative portrayals of their archetypes who both grow by learning to deal and work with the other) is actually exceptionally good writing, both from a character handling perspective and from a 'keeping your show unpolitical' perspective.
The show absolutely is suffused with triumphalism post-Cold War liberalism, but that was a practically consensus point of view at the time and it was something most of both right and left could agree on.
Maybe I am crazy, but I don't think Kinsey's red tie was a random wardrobing decision, and his particular style of bible thumping, like arguing that God would 'physically' intervene to prevent an alien attack, seemed very republican coded to me, but you are right I don't think they ever actually say what party he belongs to.
O'Neill is absolutely less of a peacenik than Daniel, but he stands in stark contrast against all the other military personal, save perhaps Hammond From Texas. He would be the most level headed security officer to ever serve on the enterprise if you slid him into TNG. Makepeace, the only other colonel in the program and one of the few military personal with a name, is an NID traitor. Jack is very superficially a gruff military man, but in practice he only really overrides Daniel when Daniel is asking him to gamble all their lives based on the style of pots the aliens use and a half translated prayer.
Red and blue as political party colors developed recently and not all at once, spawning from 2000 election night coverage where CNN showed states flipping between red and blue.
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Kinsey's style used to be something you could find along Democrats, too. Especially the budget-hawking-but-only-against-the-military bit is something that could go either way in my eyes.
O'Neill's outlook is definitely post-Vietnam military burnout, but absolutely everything else about him codes hard on the right for the time. There really was no archetype of the Dem leaning special forces guy in the 90s. If anything, he has always struck me as the kind of mostly disinterested (if not actively disgusting) in politics personally conservative but not religious middle aged white guy who would be activated by Trump in 2016.
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I recently made a similar exercise, and you're right they could get preachy, but I think there was more balance - unless I'm misinterpreting it, Voyager literally had an episode about the Great Replacement. For me the comparison was also interesting as a sanity check. There is an idea floating around that
woodennesswokeness is just a continuation of previous iterations of liberalism, and all the people objecting to it would be crying out against it watching their favorite TV shows, had they been born a generation earlier. Who knows, maybe I would have been a Reaganite, but the fact remains all the things that all the things that made me clash with wokeness, rather than go along with it - free speech, colorblindness, meritocracy - were all there in TNG's messaging. Star Trek also had episodes that I feel heralded the Awokening, and they stuck out like a sore thumb - DS9's "Far Beyond the Stars", for example.Which episode, exactly? I don't recall this plot point, but I'm no savant.
S03E24: Displaced, took a while to find it, as my memory was playing tricks on me. Could swear it was a two partner.
Thanks. I read the synopsis and still don't remember it at all. It definitely didn't leave an impression on me like the Aschen episode from SG1.
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I think you had an autocorrect issue here.
Yep. But now I kind of want to leave it there.
But also - goddamn, get with the program, autocorrect, "wokeness" isn't even that new a concept.
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I think the writing overall was better enough that it made for a satisfying watch even if you disagreed with the messaging. I think often about the TNG episode First Contact. In this episode, the crew is making covert overtures to an alien world with no prior knowledge of the existence of aliens about joining the Federation, which is fanatically opposed by Krola, an alien minister who is a clear conservative stand-in: suspicious, paranoid, religious, xenophobic, cruel, and fanatical. We the viewers know he is wrong in everything: we have prior knowledge that the Federation is benevolent, peaceful, and altruistic and that his concerns are groundless. But at the end of the episode, the leader decides that he has a point: the Federation were actually infiltrating them, and the changes they are offering may actually be destructive to the society they have. He rejects their offer, at least for a while, and they leave.
The intended message is clear: unfortunately, less-progressive attitudes have cost this society a chance to join the glorious future, and this is an parable about how conservative attitudes in contemporary society hold back the glorious future depicted in the show. But the writing is intelligent enough to see that there are both benefits and costs to any change, and actually gives their villains an in-episode win while still promoting their message. That's good writing. That makes an episode enjoyable to watch, even if you think the intended message is wrong or not a good parable.
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fmoviesz forever
RIP soap2day
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I learned English with this show so it's very near and dear to my heart. Gaeta announcing DRADIS contacts and Adama ordering vipers to launch is burned in my memory.
The real genius of BSG is that it manages to weave hard scifi concepts in with something that seems grounded and palatable enough of a character drama that people who aren't scifi fans can get drawn in and still get to do the philosophical contemplation that the genre has always been meant to cause.
It's not a perfect show, and as the writers candidly admitted they made a lot of it up as they went along (ironically they didn't have a plan), but it a properly great show in my opinion, not a merely good one. It has a real aesthetic proposition, it has something real to say and it has the means to say it.
I also very much appreciated and still appreciate how the show embraced spirituality as a natural counterpart and foil to its hypermodern grounded science fiction. It is a lot more convincing and intriguing for it and it allows it to explore more of the human condition in deeper a fashion than a now too common disdainful secularism would be able to.
Ultimately its core theme of man and machine is now so relevant it's hard not to draw parallels between classic episodes and staples of the AI debate.
Funny, I very much experienced the "spiritual" aspects as cheap filler. They definitely set an intriguing mood, but they didn't populate it with a message.
It's vanishingly rare that we see spirituality or mysticism well done in sci-fi. The Starcraft II single-player campaign was another otherwise-decent story that was held back by poorly engaging with this. I just don't think most sci-fi writers have a connection with the divine. And godly men don't write sci-fi, mostly they write about the world they belong to.
I've been thinking that BSG with the "spiritual" bits expunged would be a much greater show. Though I'm sure something else would jump out as begging to be cut.
Have you seen Babylon 5? I thought they did a pretty good job with mysticism, especially in the first two seasons.
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This. Some writer decides that it would be neat if there were two religious factions among the humans, so they introduce that concept in one episode, which gets promptly ignored after that episode is over (from what I recall).
No matter what the science guy rolls on bluff, he should not get sole permanent possession of an intact nuclear warhead which he could use to blow up the Galactica along with half the human fleet at any time. Nukes are typically tracked by someone with object permanence.
In general, if the writers had the choice between logical consistency and making the story more emotionally compelling, they mostly went for the emotionally compelling story.
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This is what kills the show for me. I do still recommend people watch the miniseries and maybe one season, but then at that point just stop and come up with your own headcanon about what's going on; whatever you imagine will probably be more enjoyable and more logical than what the writers put to paper.
To be fair, at least Ronald Moore had a good track record when he got his Mystery Box Show nonsense greenlit. I'd like to complain more about Disney being dumb enough to hire J. J. Abrams to kick off the Star Wars sequels ... except that their decision making hasn't started to backfire until many years and billions of dollars later, so can I really call it "dumb"? Instead I'll just kick myself for being dumb enough to go watch a Star Wars X Lost crossover in theaters while naively expecting it to be the start of a story with some consistency and payoffs and closure.
What aspects turned you off? I liked the political plays, the tension, the insurgency, the Mafia-style social deduction games. If you completely ignore the subplots having to do with spirituality and mysticism, it's a good show!
The combination of grandiose "there are Deep Mysterious Plans at work" claims with banal "Making Shit Up As We Go Along" reality. Ruined the whole arc plot for me as well as the social deduction games, and made the tension feel increasingly faked.
The political plays and the insurgency were excellent, I admit. And I have to credit the mysticism for at least being the least irrational way to get the plot out of an irrational corner.
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I think you can. The counterfactual of someone other than Abrams directing episode 7 is likely a film that still made a billion dollars, possibly even more. Even if they went with the same basic awful soft reboot of episode 4 as the plot, I don't think anything about Abrams's trademark Mystery Box storytelling added anything good to the film. I recall that line "that's a good question... for another time" about Luke Skywalker's lightsaber was made fun of when the film came out, and even moreso when "another time" never came in the following two films, despite Abrams directing episode 9 as well.
I think the real dumb move was probably not having a set outline for all 3 episodes that was planned out with all the writers and directors on board from the start. But then again, perhaps that's just equivalent to hiring Abrams because Abrams and planning-for-the-ending are basically water and oil.
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In general, people don't actually care about gender or race swapping: put in the best actor/actress for the job, and you can do wonders. The issue is when people try to do a "modern" remake that lacks any artistic intention or execution except "we got rid of the white men!" That's what makes people grumpy.
Starbuck, in BSG, will always be Kara Thrace to me. She's flawed, compelling, and there is no Mary Sueing or girl bossing in her character. Makes me want to rewatch over the holiday break.
Agreed. It also helps that I've never watched the original BSG series either and Kara Thrace pulled it off really well. Tricia Helfer is also very easy on the eyes.
Tricia Helfer is also, notably, not the actress playing Kara Thrace. Katee Sackhoff plays the fighter pilot, Tricia Helfer plays the toaster in high heels.
"Toaster" is deeply problematic, substratist slur for a Person of Artificial Descent.
Just kidding.
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Been a while since I watched it, but it has a plot line on discrimination between the different colonies(homeworlds) with wealthy capricorns and taurons looking down their noses at aerilons and one character being discovered to have faked his background.
Yes, but the different colonies aren't separated by skin colour/race; as far as I can remember they all run the gamut. In that respect it maps better on to debates surrounding free trade and western "exploitation" of developing nations rather than racial identity politics within western countries, especially with the talk of Zarek and his ilk as "freedom fighters" vs. terrorists
They weren’t separated by skin color but we are told that colonists can tell which colony you came from by accent, and Baltar changing his accent is a plot point that matches the 2000’s attitude towards race(there are likely destructive aspects of black culture and they should stop doing them and adopt superior white culture) especially because Baltar is said to have literally rejected his cultural background by studying extra hard.
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Watch the prequel series which followed it, Caprica. The tribe played by Black actors were from a certain poorer colony planet, and those played by swarthy actors (Mexicans, Hispanics and Italians) were from another planet known for mafia-like organized crime. The tribe who colonized Caprica was played as lily-white and privileged by comparison.
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I remember being a small child and accidentally catching a glimpse of an episode on the TV, without much in the way of additional context:
Well, I suppose that explains how I became a transhumanist!
Edit: Added what I feel is the relevant degree of emphasis.
To be fair, we can see gamma rays, astronauts see white spots/flickers of visual noise in their vision from cosmic rays detonating against their retinas. I wouldn't recommend that myself.Those are not gamma rays but mostly high energy protons and atomic nuclei.
I stand corrected then, thanks.
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Talk about tasting purple. I've always wanted to "See" x-rays too. And radio waves. To feel magnetic lines as delicately as I can feel a breath disturb the little hairs on my arms.
This one can (sort of) be arranged:
I would strongly recommend against this, if you ever plan to get an MRI done in your life. At least most piercings are less of a PITA to remove (well.. depending on how inventive you are about where you place them..).
As much as I am an ardent transhumanist, most or all current mechanical additions or replacements are only half-decent at replacing damaged parts, to me, BCIs like a Neuralink represent the first kind of augmentation that an otherwise healthy individual might want.
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