Battlestar Galactica: Saga of a Star World

[Fianna]

I think the occupation of New Caprica could have been a great direction for the series, if they'd actually stuck with it. If New Caprica had become a permanent part of the series going forward, and relations between humans and Cylons had progressed to something beyond kill/capture on sight, that would have given the story a real sense of having moved forward, of the characters making genuine progress in their struggles, and finding new struggles as a consequence.


Instead, New Caprica ended up being an odd little detour, one that had significant impact on a few characters, but was ultimately just a few episodes of doing something different before the status quo reasserted itself.

[Admiral X]

I honestly never made it all the way through the first episode of the original series. Say what you will about the grim setting of the reboot, it was far more fitting in terms of tone to the whole apocalypse thing than the tone in the original. I just couldn't get over the cornball tone, especially the parts with the kid and Starbuck being Starbuck. I also had a really hard time with the whole willing sense of disbelief thing when it came to fighters somehow laying waste to the whole human race. I have to wonder at the unwillingness to show nukes being used against the colonies.

As for the new show, I actually really liked it, right up until Adama's coup at the end of the first season. I just couldn't look at him the same way, especially since he was the one who initially balked at using military personnel to act as a police force in the fleet early on in the show. Worse yet was that there were literally no consequences to this coup, and everything went back to a kind of status quo. Worse yet was Starbuck's downward, self-destructive spiral, which just struck me as melodrama, and really spoiled the direction she had been going in before that as a leader of men. The Pegasus showing up was a highlight, but it dropped off for me after that. I actually kept on watching into the third season.

The New Caprica stuff was a really odd flip of the show's politics, and worse yet it was really obvious that they were making a parallel with Iraq that just didn't make sense and came off as forced. Of course this was just one such instance of the show and characters being changed to reflect some real world issue, whereas on DS9 the issue was changed up to suit the universe a lot better. I finally stopped watching when the new Starbuck showed up and got sent off on some pathfinding mission to try to find Earth. I tuned back in from time to time to see what was happening, but the thing that really broke my heart was that they had Galactica start falling to pieces. I also watched the last episode and ended up being really disappointed by that, not to mention the stupidity of the fleeting getting sent off into the sun to crowbar in that weird prehistory angle they decided to go with. And with an ending that reminded me quite a bit of the first Gall Force OVA, which ended in almost the exact same manner.

[SFDebris]

Was it me, or was Chuck calling Vipers ‘Starfuries’ part way through? Got some B5 reviews on the way have we!?

I thought I was going crazy, so I actually googled "battlestar galactica starfury". I then thought is was maybe a joke or something. I wouldn't put it past Chuck to do that.

Yeah. What happened was that I slipped up, as I was already past deadline in getting the work done, so I wrote off this and another error at the time, planning to fix both later for when the public release happened. The one was an editing glitch, no problem there, but I couldn't re-record as I had originally planned, so it had to go out as it was and hope no one noticed. So much for that.

[Admiral X]

Well, the vipers are somewhat famous. Actually, the pilots that flew F-16s preferred this name to the "Fighting Falcon" name, rather like how the A-10 pilots insist their planes be called Warthogs or Hogs rather than the Thunderbolt II.

[Wargriffin]

"There are people still alive in there!!"

ehh there extras just save the one name character and the abomination

[bronnt]

Where it went off the rails was when they decided to have the whole fleet land and establish the New Caprica colony. That created a whole slew of logic-defying failures that required them to come up with increasingly implausible explanations.

That was bad enough, them getting free again and then bothering to put Baltar on trial instead of just putting a bullet in the back of his head was when I dropped it.

My point wasn't that the occupation itself was necessarily the problem, but the fact that it created a ton of problems that they had to scramble to answer later in increasingly ridiculous ways. An idea can seem good on its face, but the later implications of it mean you've actually wrecked your story.

In terms of tone and theme, the reimagined series is beautifully done up until the finale (where it craps out). The plot often fell apart as they seemed to run out of stories to tell within the fleet and shifted their focus to the Cylons, where they were often missing the implication that these characters aren't that sympathetic when they've already been a party to genocide.

[Starbug]

Yeah. What happened was that I slipped up, as I was already past deadline in getting the work done, so I wrote off this and another error at the time, planning to fix both later for when the public release happened. The one was an editing glitch, no problem there, but I couldn't re-record as I had originally planned, so it had to go out as it was and hope no one noticed. So much for that.

This is the Internet: we have professional nit-pickers

[SabreMau]

I never watched this before (either old or new series), but I have seen Space Mutiny enough times to be constantly reminded of that during every exterior shot or scene in a boiler room.

[CharlesPhipps]

The problem with throwing out the Plan was not that there was a Plan. It was the fact they decided to have bad writing and make the antagonists NOT have a plan.

[Linkara]

I like both series, but while the remake had a lot of problems (I complained about the lack of an actual plan for the Cylons for years afterwards), I do prefer it to the original for it recognizing that an apocalyptic situation like this should be taken seriously and without the damn robot dog.

Still, I like them for different things that Chuck outlined - the original series is more of a sci-fi adventure series (especially with the introduction of other alien races, whereas the remake never showed any aliens outside of the Cylons) whereas the remake is a grim tale of survival. I love Calicos' Baltar for his over-the-top evilness whereas I liked remake Baltar's complexity (well, season 1-2 Baltar, anyway - when they tried to make him Jesus with a harem it was just friggin' dumb on so many levels). I'm disappointed that the remake never tried to do their own versions of Lucifer and the Imperious Leader. Sure, with their whole Cylon human models thing for leading the Cylons, it made sense they wouldn't have a single leader, but it feels like a missed opportunity.