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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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