Battlestar Galactica: Saga of a Star World

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I do get your point here though, although I'd disagree slightly. To me the problem mostly isn't that "God did it." After all, sometimes Q solves problems for the Enterprise, and the stories are usually structurally sound.

I'm struggling to think of any episode where Q solved a problem when the episode was about the problem. He solves the issue in Deja-Q at the end, but whole episode was about the crew dealing with Q amid their current crisis, which is generally unmemorable. Q-Who might be as close as you get, but that's still a situation created by Q and it was about demonstrating that the Enterprise wasn't ready to deal with everything they encountered.

In most Q episodes, Q does something with his powers to bring about the resolution, from Q-Who to Q-Pid to Tapestry to All Good Things. It's true that in almost all cases Q is the one who creates the scenario/problem in the first place.

I guess a better way to express my point is to simply say that it's not necessarily bad in terms of drama or plotting to solve problems with the help of magic or the supernatural. Whether it be technology, divine intervention, magic, or whatever, the problem is when that intervention is invented at the very end of the story as a way to solve a problem a writer can't think of any other way to get out of. To me, that's what a real deus ex machina is.

In BSG, I would say that there is some level of set-up for most of the problems. There's possible cases of divine intervention as early as the first season. As you said, we could see from very early on that something messed with Starbuck and that she was basically a sleeper agent. I agree with you that it was disappointing in the end, but to me that's because it was simply a weak payoff. Maybe saying "God did it" is part of the reason the payoff was weak, but I think there's a distinction between that and an actual deus ex machina. But again, this is a pretty minor point because I do get where you're coming from here.

[Beastro]

I didn't really have a problem with any of the religious themes in the re-imagined series. My only issue was that it was often a cop-out: We're going to pull random plot twists out of our ass and just say "God did it." It's not interesting.

For instance, they decided to pretend they were killing off Starbuck. It was ridiculously telegraphed since the very episode in which they killed her off they set up a character arc for her

The way I see it, the religious themes were established from season 1, and probably most other sci-fi series have some sort of powerful, mostly unexplained being- including B5, every Trek series, and many more. So it's only when characters start calling this being "God" people suddenly have a problem with it? I don't get that.

I think a problem is they weren't established enough, so later on they seemed abrupt, at least coming from how the original handled things which were forthright and upfront.

A good example is the differences with how Kobol was handled. In the original it set enough of a tone that the later episodes, like War of the Gods, didn't feel out of place. The reboot Kobol, though, is deflating. Not a planet of deities and larger than life ancestors, but of a predecessor civilization that destroyed itself in same old, human ways, that led many to think the series was going to ground and even eliminate many aspects of Galatica in the same way it grounded many other elements.

With that in mind, the later shifts were as striking as if the show suddenly became light hearted and campy while the end episode suddenly went full bore with the old series' casual tone towards danger and death, robot pets 'n annoying kids start popping up, while on Earth they find themselves running into a Wolfman Jack impersonator.

[cdrood]

I will never forget watching this on the premiere night and having it interrupted for the signing of the Camp David Accords. I was 2 months shy of my 11th birthday. I was not happy. I can't help but wonder if that hurt the show at all. Admittedly, budget and competition were the bigger issues.

[Rose Garden Witch]

I will never forget watching this on the premiere night and having it interrupted for the signing of the Camp David Accords. I was 2 months shy of my 11th birthday. I was not happy. I can't help but wonder if that hurt the show at all. Admittedly, budget and competition were the bigger issues.

Eh, not sure if we can blame President Carter for hurting oBSG.

[cdrood]

Small nitpick. Star Furies were the fighters on Babylon 5. Galactica calls their fighters vipers.

[Rose Garden Witch]

Small nitpick. Star Furies were the fighters on Babylon 5. Galactica calls their fighters vipers.

Chuck already mentioned he made a mistake there but is was too late to fix it.

[cdrood]

On the new show, I mostly liked it, but they didn't really think things through and Babylon 5 had kind of spoiled me on that front. First, there was the fact that humanoid Cylons were nearly impossible to detect, but Boomer had a USB port inside her forearm. As with others, I felt the New Caprica arc caused things to fall apart, especially with the insane decision to sacrifice the better armed, more up to date ship to save the old broken down one because it's in the title.

[cdrood]

While I never thought about it with the original series because I was 11, the Kobol/13th colony thing always caused me a problem. The whole temple on the algae planet just made it worse. In order for there to be a map to Earth on Kobol, someone had to have come back and record that information. In the original series, I always had the impression they all left at the same time and they only kind of knew the direction the 13th tribe went. They seemed to get all the constellations as viewed from Earth in the new, which means someone definitely came back.

They probably should have created more of a power struggle with Cavil earlier with other models coming to his side as things failed. Having him as the leader along with his atheism and hatred of being an organic Cylon made the whole breeding program make little sense.

[cdrood]

A major difference between the two shows is how they tended to portray civilian government, but there were also similarities as well. The new show seemed to favor keeping a semblance of the government intact, but pretty much became a dictatorship or as Apollo pointed out, they were a gang not a civilization. Over time, they came to realize that many of the beliefs they had simply couldn't hold up when on the verge of extinction like in the abortion episode.

The original show pretty much portrayed them as a pain in the ass and that they needed to shut up and let Adama make the decisions. The closest thing they ever come to competence is to at least make Count Iblis prove himself before unilaterally naming him Imperious Leader. Every time the council or the civilian security force was involved, they were there to cause the main characters problems and they were always wrong.

[cdrood]

Just a funny personal story about this pilot. At the time, my sister had gone through a string of getting into new shows that were quickly canceled, so we jokingly called her a TV jinx. We're watching the pilot and she made a comment about liking Zack (she was 14 and it was Rick Springfield). When he gets killed almost immediately after, it led to much hilarity in my home.