1. Athena was gorgeous, but apparently her acting range was not there. Something put the showrunners off about her early on. It may be that she was a lousy actress. It may be that she took the same approach to the producers casting couch as she did Starbuck. It was sadly the 70's.CharlesPhipps wrote: ↑Fri Nov 12, 2021 11:43 pm I should point out the Cylons in original recipe Battlestar Galactica AREN'T robots. They are in fact a race of lizard people that have had their brains transferred into robotic bodies like the Cybermen of Doctor Who. This is because Battlestar Galactica was a weird mishmash of conspiracy theories, Mormon theology, and popular UFO as well as New Age spirtualism. The David Icke monsters just happened to also be shiny chrome machines because it was easier to film a guy in a robot suit with a voice modulator.
Some BSG thoughts:
1. Athena was incredibly beautiful and it was a shame she had such a reduced role.
2. BSG deserves credit for being far better than Star Wars in terms of diversity. Hell, better than Star Trek.
3. Dirk Benedict's character didn't age well but I'm not sure that attempting to frack a man's sister after his death for comfort wasn't skeevy in the Seventies too.
4. Baltar being so stupid as to get his own race annihilated is sadly not unbelievable given the history of Nazi collaborators getting treated as useful fools.
5. I'm sadly annoyed about Apollo's LI getting killed decades later as a happily married man on televison is apparently STILL radical.
2. Heck BSG did diversity better than nuBSG. Which might be the only Hollywood production in modern history to race swap two major characters from black to not black. Not that I have anything against Michael Hogan's amazing Tigh inNuBSG. But I always loved the balance Herebert Jefferson's Boomer brought to Starbuck and Apollo in the original.
3. It was Hollywood. Bill Cosby. Roman Polanski, Woody Allen. Fucking the dead guys sister was on the lower end of skeevy. So long as you weren't "Bill Cosby'ing" her drink. That might cross the line into full blown skeevy.
I'm actually a little shocked at a major detail that Chuck missed about the original BSG pilot/tv movie. (and yeah I'm showing my age) All that stuff early in the episode about human's liberty being "alien" to the Cylons? Some of the other commentary throughout the episode. There's an important detail that everybody misses about this first outing. The Cylon's were not "officially" Robots yet. When production began they were still some sort of bug lizard things wearing armor. They were an Alien Species. It was once they discovered how good and yet robotic the suits came out that they had the brainstorm to make the Cylon's Robots. As it avoided a ton of potential problems with Network Standards. They didn't care how many robots got shot or blown up. The Cylon's as some sort of reptilian aliens also explans the strange organic creature that is the Imperious Leader. (who would never really be seen again). In the Novelization the Centurians had one brain. The leadership until ie Lucifer would be given 2 brains, and the Imperious Leader would have a third brain added to his skull. I think they switched to Cylons as Robots about halfway through production.
There are a few other things that only show up here in this episode. Actual Aliens. The strange creatures running the space casino. After this all we meet are other humans. Or various cyborgs, or the gods/devil.
