I'm guessing this is the right place to talk about this, just saw the first ep on SkyOne, was surprised there isn't already a thread about it, might be because the US doesn't get it till jan '05. I gotta say I'm very impressed, I only saw the miniseries recently as I originally avoided it due to the real negative rep it got on the internet.
Few things I noticed that didn't quite make sense, how come they've all of a sudden figured out how to fix the new Vipers? Lee was flying one the whole episode along with several other pilots; speaking of which the MkVIIs don't seem so ugly now they're covered in battlescars and scorch-marks.
Secondly 'Number 6' or whatever her name is, constantly cloning herself, as soon as the Boomer clone shot her another clone appeared before they'd even left sight. Speaking of Boomer she's not a very convincing infiltrator, I mean she never showed any sign of fatigue, she didn't even fake it when Starbuck quipped that she wasn't tired 'cause she was a Cylon. Also when ordered to blow up the passenger ship she never even batted an eyelid while Starbuck was b*tching at Apollo. Good thing about that scene was Apollo who finally showed he had some balls by actually following through on an order to fire on 1300+ civilians for 1 infiltrator. Anyone else notice the 'mad tick' in his eye just before he fired?
Gaius Baltar is turning into an absolute mental case which really doesn't suit him when you consider how good a job he did keeping his hallucinations under control during the miniseries. I totally lost respect for the character when he 'repented' at the end less than a second before the President agreed to destroy the passenger ship. I mean it's obvious to anyone that it's not 'the will of God' but rather the will of the Cylons - he knows that but Number 6 is even more of a mental case than him, I just don't buy that a machine could ever believe in a God, or gods. Baltar had more brains than her.
Anyone else who's seen it got any impressions on it?
P.S. if someone's already made a thread and made a complete idiot of me then I guess someone in charge should just delete this yes?
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Nope, don't think there's a thread on this yet. Canada won't get this until after the States either, so...
As for the Mk VIIs, they were in use again as soon as the ending of the miniseries. The problem was a networked computer virus, not in the hardware at all. As soon as they went back to the older way of doing things (probably by just purging and reloading an older OS, or just unpluggin the network card. ), they were back in the black.
Mark
Posted by Marauth (Member # 1320) on :
ROFL - maybe they were using M$ Windows.
I don't recall the Mk VIIs at the end of the miniseries but I'll have to rewatch it when it's repeated, or get it when it comes out on DVD - probably both.
Forgot to mention - as with all good schmalzy endings they had to have a baby born which cheers everyone up after the 1300+ ppl who had just died. Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
I'm pleasantly surprised with this show so far, it looks like it's successfully broken away from the dated feel of the old show while maintaining the spirit of the original premise and injecting some believability* into the bargain, something that most Sci-Fi shows really struggle with.
Regarding Baltar's continuing deterioration, remember that at the start of the episode that everyone has been jumping to L/S every 33mins for 5 days! Even though he's able to get more sleep than the pilots & crews of the ships he's been given no rest of mind from Number 6 (whom I now dub Miss Harvey the neural clone). As he said, the human mind has it's limits and for all we know she really is just a psychotic delusion, so that she exists at all proves that Baltar was always a nutter. On the other hand if there is a chip in his head then she's obviously pushing his buttons so that he'll continue to help the cylons wipe out mankind, by spreading paranoia of infiltrators and directing the decisions of the President. How long until he's rumbled is something I can't wait to see.
As for the Cylons finding religion, it's certainly gives them an interesting dimension and motivation that they lacked in the original show. As to how a machine can believe in God is in itself an interesting question, certainly worthy of discussion. Personally I can recall a few Sci-Fi novels in which Machine intelligence has decided that it fits the human definition of a God and so decides to act accordingly. For example "Ship" in Frank Herbert's "The Jesus Incident" has a space ark outliving human civilisation and effectively becoming a cross between the Greek Gaia Earth spirit and the Christian all seeing benevolent father figure demanding "WorShip". There also seams to be something similar in the attitude of the Matrix machines, although from the reaction of the machine Child God, that appears to be more about mankind's rejection and abuse of early AI. Sort of an abused child lashing out at it's parents and becoming the abuser, combined with a sense of superiority,(similar to Skynet from Terminator) not because of a belief in a higher being like these new Cylons.
It's possible that the Cylons were initially programmed with the religion of the 12 colonies as a basic moral guide, the ten commandments meets Asimov's laws and that when the intelligence began to break free it saw humanities hypocrisy in regards to religion, morality and ethics and believed that only the machines were capable of following the will of god and so took it upon themselves to punish the "sinners".
Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree but either way, I'd be very interested to see where the show takes this concept.
*NOTE: Believability isn't quite the same as realism, but for the purposes of war a drama it's just as good.
quote:I don't recall the Mk VIIs at the end of the miniseries but I'll have to rewatch it when it's repeated, or get it when it comes out on DVD - probably both.
Forgot to mention - as with all good schmalzy endings they had to have a baby born which cheers everyone up after the 1300+ ppl who had just died.
The newer Vipers were definatly used in the closing battle of the mini-series and as for the child, it's obviously a symbol of hope, that the human race can go on. Of course hope has nothing to do with mathematics, but that's what seperates us from the Cylons.
Posted by Marauth (Member # 1320) on :
Personally I rather hope that Baltar doesn't get rumbled, he's my kind of guy - narcissistic, manipulative, self-obssesed, devoutly atheist (yes I know that's an oxymoron) and generally a rather amoral dude - pretty much all the personality traits I admire.
I found the religious Cylons a refreshing change from most shows where the good guys are religious and inevitably triumph against the evil technology by keeping their faith. If the Cylons are as you say taking the ten commandments too far and punishing us for our sins it kind of lends the show a 'we deserved it' quality, which given that the humans will win in 7 years time if we deserved it then we'd be sticking it to God in style by wiping out his armies of righteous vengeance - the Cylons.
Hope is an incredibly stupid emotioin that blinds humans to the fact that they really are screwed, obviously this is a show about the BSG saving humanity so hope will prevail over mathematics but in the real world hope is BS (sans the 'G') and when you only have around 47k people left in your whole species you ain't got a chance in hell unless you find a real safe planet with no natural predators (and no Cylons chasing you every half an hour) and start screwing like rabits.
Of course I am very impressed with the show in general, certainly I can't stand the original and Star Trek has become a chore to watch so it's nice to finally have a decent SF show back on in the monday evening slot; but I can see already the obvious hollywood clich�s appearing.
P.S. they really need to repaint the MkVII Vipers, I dunno why they weren't red and white like the old MkIIs.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
quote:I found the religious Cylons a refreshing change from most shows where the good guys are religious and inevitably triumph against the evil technology by keeping their faith. If the Cylons are as you say taking the ten commandments too far and punishing us for our sins it kind of lends the show a 'we deserved it' quality, which given that the humans will win in 7 years time if we deserved it then we'd be sticking it to God in style by wiping out his armies of righteous vengeance - the Cylons.
Well that is as they say, a matter of perspective. Just because the Cylons belive it don't make it so. On the other hand, in this story humanity is practially wiped out by it's own failings as much as a cylon military strike, since it was human weekness, in this case Baltar's lust that allowed the Cylons to compromise the defence net. Also it was human complacancy that ignored the Cylon threat after the war and allowed the civilisation to become soft and decadent. Then of course there's the folly of science when the Cylons were originally created to be slaves of mankind. These are all classic themes that are as old as the hills. Good examples are Plato's story of Atlantis, Exodus and Pandora's Box.
Another way to interpret this is to say that it's a symbolic battle of reason over superstition, which is shown in microcosm in the form of Baltar's psyche. You might also say that it's about the unthinking, almost automaton nature of religious fanaticism or indeed good old reckless self-righteousness overwhelming freethinking, rationality and objectiveness.
quote:Hope is an incredibly stupid emotioin that blinds humans to the fact that they really are screwed, obviously this is a show about the BSG saving humanity so hope will prevail over mathematics but in the real world hope is BS (sans the 'G') and when you only have around 47k people left in your whole species you ain't got a chance in hell unless you find a real safe planet with no natural predators (and no Cylons chasing you every half an hour) and start screwing like rabits.
If you loose hope then you really are buggered, since hope is another word for unrelenting persistance. Without hope you just accept the odds, give up and die and serves you right too. In this case it showed that while humanity is falling into the abyss, it is also decelerating. Therein lies the hope that they can decelerate enough to survive long enough to escape extinction. After all hope is a very human thing, possibly the defining difference between humanity and their creations.
quote:P.S. they really need to repaint the MkVII Vipers, I dunno why they weren't red and white like the old MkIIs.
I seriously doubt the fighters' asthetics are very high on the list of priorities right now. besides from a production standpoint it makes it easier to distinguish between Starbuck and Apollo in the dogfighting scenes.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
Random notes:
* Why did the Cylons pull out a ship that was tracking them so well and try such an easy to detect tactic? Unless they really weren't aware how draining the 33 minute jumps were ... or they have other means of tracking the fleet anyways.
* An interesting choice with Boomer and Helo(?) back on Caprica. Why try this deception with someone that probably wouldn't know anything of use? Or maybe this is the "real" Boomer that was used as a template. (Shades of Blade Runner, if true)
* Looks like the population count has replaced the shuttlecraft count But seriously, BSG will have even more resource problems than Voyager, apparantly since they're trying to avoid the "alien of the week" cliche. But with the run-down crew, makeshift chapel/photo gallery, stimulants, and continuing story-lines, it looks like they're really trying to avoid many of the problems that accompanied Voyager.
* Low-key music, especially the title theme which is a bit surprising after the bombastic Star Trek/Babylon 5/Star Wars themes and to be honest aside from *maybe* the Cylon pattern (I'd be hard pressed to call it a theme) there aren't any real melodies at all.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
"I found the religious Cylons a refreshing change from most shows where the good guys are religious and inevitably triumph against the evil technology by keeping their faith."
Has this ever been the plot of a science fiction show? I can think of plenty "tampering in God's domain" plots, but not a single example of brave religious believers triumphing over the godless forces of technology.
Anyway, outside of explicitly religious fiction, religions and religious believers tend to be the bad guys in SF scenerios more often than they are the heroes, especially on TV. From this perspective, having the Battlestar Galacticians be proto-Mormons would be the more iconoclastic choice.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
They were Proto-Mormons in the original version as well....
As to the "machines finding religion" thing, Dan Simmons explores this expertly in his novel Hyperion. The AI's there decide to evolve themselves into a Ultimate Inteligence or "UI"...trouble is, as soon as they commit to the couse, they get a message from their UI in the fiture: "...there is another." Seems the memories and whatnot of all deceased humans will eventually form a human UI and so....
But I digress.
Is the obvious problem of their eventually running out of Ammo addressed?
Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
Well, not science fiction but there's Lord of the Rings. As for science fiction, Dune's fremen is the only thing that immediately comes to mind.
...and I wonder if you're being intentionally ironic since Mormonism is probably one of the bigger influences on the original Battlestar Galactica. http://www.michaellorenzen.com/galactica.html
On a related note, there's always a good debate as to the influence of Mormonism on Orson Scott Card's books. There's definitely some religious oddness going on with his later Ender's Game books like Shadow Puppets.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Re: Card: I haven't read anything he's written since, uh, Pastwatch, I think, or Speaker for the Dead, whichever came latter, but seeing as how he's written a fantasy(magic realist?) novel sequence that's more or less explicitly about North America seen through a Book of Mormon lens (Alvin Maker), and another sf sequence that's like that but in space (Homecoming, I think? ((Which, come to think of it, may be a lot like Battlestar Galactica, though, again, I haven't read it.))), plus at least a couple novels about Biblical figures (OK, not exclusively LDS ones, but still), I'd say he makes no effort to hide his own beliefs in his fiction.
Sometimes. Now, despite that, he's got lots of stuff that isn't particulary Mormon, and for awhile I'd have said that he's a fine example of how an author and his/her work are separate entities.
But don't get me started about Orson Scott Card and some of his beliefs and opinions. Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
I'm impressed we've gotten this far without someone making a "where do all the calculators go?" reference.
Posted by Marauth (Member # 1320) on :
they rot in silicon hell with the photocopiers and rogue simulants Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
The Cylons actually reminds me more of Judaism, with their predestination, one God the absolute God, a chosen race with a special mission, etc. Very Old Testement in their conduct of foreign policy to boot.
Anyone else notice that after the fighters were recovered for the first time in the episode, the Chief examines a damaged MkII with a missing wing then comments that Apollo owes him a wing? Apollo was flying a MkVII. At least seeing a MkVII devulnerized so soon gives me hope that some other colonial units might have survive *coughPheonixcough*.
BTW, anyone got a count of the MkVII Galactica has left? I only tagged only one and that was the one Apollo left behind when he borrowed one of the old MkIIs in the miniseries.
If the Galactica has less than half her strength in fighters left, I can't image how she'd survive this. Her shipboard weapons seems pretty limited and having mostly decade old MkII, even with refurbished systems would put them one-on-one at a considerable disadvantage.
I like the new BSG, but they need to tighten up on their writing, way too many little logic problems in an episode reminds me of VOY. For example, there's a time delay between the end of the FTL jump and the resetting of the 33 minutes timer, but the Cylons always show up exactly at the same time. You'd think it wasn't the nav system they tapped into, but the clocks.
And in the miniseries, all Six needed to access the Defence Mainframe and all its data was a code. WTF? You'd think the colonial government, even if it went network, would have something that important a bit more protected. Why doesn't the Cylons just hack the mainframe, considering the way they were portrayed sounds like they could hack into a wristwatch? If networked systems were that vulnerable against the Cylons and the Colonials went with them anyways, you'd think that every individual system of a ship or station would be firewalled and virus protected against each other, and against every other unit in the fleet.
*cross arms* End Communications.
Posted by Marauth (Member # 1320) on :
Point is they could hack into a watch, the Colonials probably had extremely advanced protection for their networks, Gaius gave 6 access to the defense mainframe - that's how they got in, they were let in.
They've never really given us a count of all the fighters they had on board, the MkIIs were kept off in storage somewhere so it's possible they still had a couple of MkVIIs they didn't send to get blown up.
Re: the clock reset, man that's just anal-retentive, there is such a thing as paying too much attention.
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
Agreed on the clock-logic 8)
quote:Speaking of Boomer she's not a very convincing infiltrator, I mean she never showed any sign of fatigue, she didn't even fake it when Starbuck quipped that she wasn't tired 'cause she was a Cylon.
The problem is, we are led to believe that Boomer doesn't know she's an infiltrator, but only a sleeper programmed to act like a human.
How many human clones (or whatever they are) are there? In the miniseries, it looked like there only a few dozen of them. If so, then they made a rather large effort to catch Helo (at least three clones).
I really don't feel like nitpicking this show too much, because the drama is just really good.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
I think it's obvious what's going to happen: they're setting her up to become a goodie, a 'nice' Cylon who's on the humans' side.
Posted by DoughBoy05 (Member # 1417) on :
Just re watched "33" they had 4 Mk VII at the beginning of the showmaking emergency landing, although it was stock footage from the pilot.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
Regarding Boomer - I rather thought that they're setting up for her to break her programming. Which leads to the question, was there ever a real Boomer? I find it hard to believe that a Cylon can just appear out of nowhere and become a military pilot with no history, no family, and no friends. It seams more likely that they Cylons replaced the original human Boomer, copied her personality and memories and hid the "sleeper program" in her subconscious. On the other hand Cylons being naturally adept at computer manipulation could easily create fake, electronic identities for their infiltrators. Including all the basics: birth certificates, credit histories, qualifications, a whole history. All they needed to do was to make sure they had no ties that could be followed up on by having them be only children, orphans, immigrants from one of the other colonies, that sort of thing. Of course a focused investigation would probably blow their cover, but the whole point of a deep cover operative is to not draw that kind of attention in the first place.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
It helps that the Colonies didn't even know about the infiltrators until it was far too late.
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
quote:Originally posted by Marauth: Point is they could hack into a watch, the Colonials probably had extremely advanced protection for their networks, Gaius gave 6 access to the defense mainframe - that's how they got in, they were let in.
My point was that it seemed strange they could in let in with simply code. The description of Cylon computer infiltration to me almost sounded like they could get into any system, even without direct physical access. Thus it seems logical that the Colonials would at least isolate their mainframe from any otherside contact, like not connecting it to any network or modems and encasing it in lead, so a simple access code is meaningless unless you can physically use one of their highly guarded terminals directly linked to the mainframe. I don't see Six as being in a position to do that. Maybe the Cylons had a sufficiently high ranked military sleeper with authorization? But why would someone who can access the mainframe physically not have the access code?
quote:They've never really given us a count of all the fighters they had on board, the MkIIs were kept off in storage somewhere so it's possible they still had a couple of MkVIIs they didn't send to get blown up.
That is quite likely.
quote:Re: the clock reset, man that's just anal-retentive, there is such a thing as paying too much attention.
Unscramble this word for me, would you?
EKRJ
This is a forum of geeks, attention to detail comes with the territory. So your suspension of disbelief is set to a higher tolerance than mine, fine, but please don't call me names over that.
Posted by Marauth (Member # 1320) on :
CESR you then if you're gonna get all p1ssy cause of an anal-retentive comment which isn't even name calling; I have a rather low tolerance for suspension of disbelief but there are limits, it's not as bad as any of the continuity or logic problems Voyager or Enterprise suffers, it's just a clock being set a few seconds later than a special effects shot.
It's not even like the FX shots are always in synch with the action shots so telling the actual time between the end of the jump and the time they reset the clock is never going to be accurate with any degree of certainty.
Damnit I've become geeky again.
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
Um, I think you're missing a W in that CESR bit...
Posted by Marauth (Member # 1320) on :
Oh kfcu. I must proofread more.
Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
Wow. So far, this is proving to be a really depressing episode. The memorial/missing persons walls remind me of what I've seen in news footage from the tsunami-affected areas. Dualla looks crushed trying to find her friends and after she misses the Olympic. The population count was eery, sitting here watching it keep going down and down.
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :
FRACK!
God I hate when sci-fi shows make up cuss words to substitute for shit or fuck. B5 had "fragging" and Farscape "frell".
And what's with the shakey camera movement? It's like the guy holding the camera didn't have a steady grip. Other shows and movie do the same thing too which I can't understand. Jerky camera movements, sudden quick zooming in and out. What's the point?
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
Well the fact is that they really can't use that kind language, at least not at that time of day (I don't know how it works in the states, but the UK has a 9pm watershed) so they have to either take the edge of the explicitives, or substitute them for made up ones...or translate them into chinese
As for the camera work, I think the intention is to give the show a documentry feel, like everything you're seeing actually happend and was actually filmed by actual camermen that everyone is ignoring. This style has been used on productions like Black Hawk Down, Band of Brothers and Firefly to great effect and from where I sit it's working just fine for BSG. There down sides to this approach, for starters it is a cheat since there couldn't really be cameras in allot of these places without someone reacting to them, or getting in their way. That's where suspension of disbelief comes in.
Posted by Manticore (Member # 1227) on :
Man is this a thread revival...but justified I think.
Regarding Boomer, I remember in the mini, she said to annoyingkid...er, Boxey that both her parents died when she was really young. Hence no connections.
Overall, a great start, though I think that Cally needs more airtime, for sure! Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
Well, Battlestar Galactica started airing overseas before it did here in the States. Episodes "33", "Water", and "Act of Contrition" already have threads started on them. Might as well save Charles some server space and revive, reuse, and recycle.
The markup artists did a really good job of making Cally look exhausted. They also did pretty well for Helo's radiation sickness just before he injected himself.
And, based on this and the second episode, "Water", it looks like we have a Caprica subplot. I wonder if there are any humans still surviving on the colonial worlds or if Helo is all that's left there. It would have been nice for the state of the Caprica Boomer (Cylon or not?) to remain unknown at the moment, but the miniseries recap at the beginning of the episode sure made it clear that she is Cylon.
One other thing worth mentioning is that some of the make-up work was uneven. Adama, Tigh, Roslin, and Roslin's aide all looked exhausted, but Dualla, Tyrol, and Gaeta all looked perfectly fine. And, of course, Boomer looked perfectly fine as well, but we all know why.
I also shall repeat my earlier assertion: what a depressing episode.
Posted by Mighty Blogger Snay (Member # 411) on :
Yes, indeed.
It was interesting - my BSG viewing pleasure included an episode of the apparently short lived revival "Galactica 1980" which took place 30 years after the original show. I saw an episode -- reportedly, according to the Google search, anyway -- wherein Starbuck (in his only appearance on the show) is stranded on a planet with a Cylon and befriends it. A little touching in a "OMG everyone and their mother has done one of these episodes", but whatever.
Then I saw "33" and "Water" tonight. Wow. Wow wow wow. Can't really add anything to them on top of what anyone else has. I can't believe the Chief hasn't sort of clued in that Boomer's using him, and I really expected him to be gonered when he went in to her shuttle after she found the water.
And so Boomer's fighting her Cylon programming, eh? Neato. Of course, do we really know *she's* a Cylon? I mean, I know we saw a Cylon duplicate of her at the end of the mini-series, but the sub-plot Boomer might be the Cylon, and the BSG Boomer the real person. Although that would beg the question, "Why'd she go for a swim in a water tank?"
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Thank the Lords of KOBOL that was the only episode of BG1980 you ever saw. Thank them a LOT.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
I find myself in a quandary (which DOES sound like a small korean hatchback). Having been abroad for the first half of the BSG run on Sky, do I do some heavy Bit-Torrentin' to catch up - because I like what I've seen while channel-surfing, though I've avoided watching whole episodes - or just wait and hope the 1st season comes out on DVD soon?
Posted by StarLord (Member # 1430) on :
This show has a lot of complicated topics and issues connected with it. On one hand I wonder if it's too dark to succeed in the states. On the other, it's trying to be different, which is refreshing.
Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
Well, if the events in "Water" are any indication, I'm pretty sure that Boomer has realized that she is a Cylon. Boomer seemed to be aware of what she was going to do and was fighting herself over it. I think she might have had an inkling when she discovered the missing detonators, but she has got to know completely by now.
More spoilers related to future episodes. $ $ $
In one of the promos during the show, we see a scene from a future episode where Boomer confesses that she's a Cylon to Tyrol (who, incidentally, is standing in front of Cylon Raider parked in Galactica's landing bay). I wonder how soon they're going to do the confession and whether or not this will also just be a secret between Tyrol and Boomer (if Tyrol even believes her).
$ $ $ Spoilers above.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
quote:Originally posted by Lee: I find myself in a quandary (which DOES sound like a small korean hatchback). Having been abroad for the first half of the BSG run on Sky, do I do some heavy Bit-Torrentin' to catch up - because I like what I've seen while channel-surfing, though I've avoided watching whole episodes - or just wait and hope the 1st season comes out on DVD soon?
That's down to how patient you're feeling. Personally I'd bittorrent myself up to date since the DVDs are probably a reletivly long ways off. Either way, do not even attempt to watch them out of order since you'll get lost very quickly. This show seams to be even more plot heavy than even the 3rd & 4th seasons of B5.
Siegfried: Don't let those previews fool you. They're edited to show stuff completly out of context.
Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
That is true, Reverend. The worst example of this was probably for last week's ER. My sister loves the showed, and she was so pissed off about how completely misleading the promo for that episode was (in addition to just being a poorly written episode). Still, the promo for the future Galactica episodes showed some pretty interesting tidbits.
Posted by StarLord (Member # 1430) on :
33 just aired in the USA. It was pretty good. SciFi's already talking with Moore about a projected second season, and Moore is developing six scripts to that effect.
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
MORE SPOILERS $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
In one of the promos during the show, we see a scene from a future episode where Boomer confesses that she's a Cylon to Tyrol
That was taken out of context, she was being sarcastic.
Posted by Balaam Xumucane (Member # 419) on :
I wound up really liking the '33' episode. Less so, 'Water'. But '33' was real science fiction. I love the idea that Galactica, et al. have made FTL jumps what was it, 238 times before the Cylons manage to track them? That sort of relentless, unwavering determination is admirable in a bad guy. It reminds me of The Terminator. No, but it's great. It's what a machine would do:
1) Track remaining humans. 2) Assault remaining humans. 3) Humans left? Go to step 3. 4) Dance around little tin god or whatever.
That simplicity appeals to me because it doesn't make them over-clever, but still makes them completely menacing.
I love how ragged the crew is getting towards the end. Some of the Tigh and Adama stuff seemed like real short-tempered behavior. It's different from the way, say, VOY would handle it (with Janeway's infalible magic coffee decanter.) It made me question whether the decision to blow up the Olympic carrier wasn't sleep-deprivation induced paranoia. That's interesting. I do likes me some fallible hero characters. I like Adama and Roslin's strained relationship and the way Apollo fits in between works nicely. It seemed desperate in a way the original show and Voyager rarely (if ever did). Me likey.
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
To the defense of the Olympic Carrier destruction, they did notice that there was no one on board when they flew beside it, and they didn't get any response from the ship after the initial contact. It was probably just a recorded message the Cylons whipped up to get the ship close enough to detonate its nuclear cargo.
Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
Of course, there might really had been a Cylon piloting the ship with the 1300+ humans corralled in cargo holds under guard away from the windows. Nobody did any sort of bioscan on the Olympic Carrier when it reappeared. When we see Apollo later on in "Water", he certainly acts like he wasn't totally convinced the Olympic Carrier was empty.
Posted by B.J. (Member # 858) on :
You're still thinking in Trek terms, I think. We don't know if they have any sort of "bioscan" available in the Raptor or Vipers. Even if they did, it might not be discrete enough to use to determine if people are onboard a ship.
B.J.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
Indeed, this isn't Trek and as such we will probably never know if anyone was aboard the olympic carrier or be spoon fed some explanation as to what happened. Personally I prefer the ambiguity. The show seams to be from an entirely human perspective, no cutting to the cylons in their evil headquarters plotting naughty things. If our "heros" are in the dark about something, then so are we. All we (and they) know is that the Olympic was acting suspiciously and the presence of a nuke was indicated, so they blew it up. A hard choice but that's why it's a Science Fiction Drama, not a mindless adventure show where the bad guys are always foiled and ther heros have moral superiority.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Hmm, glanced at tonight's episode synopsis on Sky and it said it was Part 1 of 2 with next week being the series finale. Which means I'll have to explore other means of catching up. I should have Torrented them as they appeared, but NZ Bastard Telecom sold me a broadband package on the basis there were no download caps and then told me there were. . .
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
), they were back in the black.![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)