I'm not sure how I feel about all this prophecy stuff. Like, what I am willing to accept as true, within the confines of any particular fictional entertainment? Anyway, I really like strange prophecy stuff in general, but while the show is on the border between actual divinity and (mere) religious belief, I sort of waver between ways to interpret the story that don't necessarily help it, if that makes sense. That is, while "Is it real? Is it not?" is certainly a fine tension to exploit, I'm not sure it is working for me in this instance.
Six seems to be getting meaner.
(Ron Moore is all "people will smoke in the show because people smoke in real life" and I am like "yeah!" but then I think "uh, the reason people in enclosed spaces don't smoke has less to do with their own health than it does overall environmental conditions," and then I wonder: is smoking allowed on submarines? So I guess I will go look that up now.)
Registered: Mar 1999
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My suspicion, incidently, prior to Google, is that hell yes they did when they were fighting the Nipponese and the Nazis, because that was what goddamned men did when they were fighting foreign sons of bitches.
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Easily the best episode of the series to date. And the end is quite a welcome release of pressure from the overall darkness of the previous episodes.
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Ooooh, I really like this one. And a lot of it has to do with them actually attacking back and not just running away. Can someone who has watched the episode more recently than I have give us a breakdonw on the tactics they use in the strike on the Cylon outpost?
For what it's worth, I've recently been reading Tom Clancy's book, Submarine (insomnia is great) where he goes into great detail describing the weapons and operations of a Nuclear attack submarine. One of the things he mentions is that as of the writing of that book, smoking was indeed allowed aboard this ship. I got the impression it's decided on a ship by ship basis. Or was. Or something. But yeah, in an enclosed space, no matter how much air you're manufacturing, that's still a lot of people breathing stuff they don't want to.
Registered: Sep 2000
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Plan A, the public plan, started with the freighters drawing off most of the Cylon fighters while Galactica swept in and destroyed the base. Apollo says that then the Cylons won't be able to refuel or reload, and will be easy to pick off, but I'm thinking, what about the fuel and weapons the ships are already carrying? "Hey Cylons, we totally blew up your base!" "Oh no! Now we'll be out of missiles once we use the ones we've got here to blow you up."
Plan B, the secret plan, involves betting that the Cylons will figure out that the freighters are a decoy, and turn to attack Galactica, so the strike force is hidden in one of the freighters, which I'm pretty sure is an attack plan from X-Wing.
I'm not sure I buy Adama's schoolyard bully logic, either.
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Sol System: I'm not sure I buy Adama's schoolyard bully logic, either.
I wasn't so sure that was a particularly wise or measured tactic either. Perhaps they were just trying to give their target demographic something they could really relate to. (If only I'd had a battlestar to back my shit up in middle school.)
Registered: Sep 2000
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Finally got around to seeing this episode... I still think I like "33" better, but this came damn close to being the best of the series to date.
Considering how many shows out there like to create their own mythology (and also how prevalent it still is in our own society), I don't really have a problem with them introducing them in Galactica. IMO the best sci-fi use of prophecies was the Prophets and their relationship to the Bajoran people -- and of course, Ron Moore (plus Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, who wrote this episode) were on the DS9 staff, after all. So if anyone can pull this story off, it would be the Galactica folks.
As I mention in a recent blog entry, whether the prophecy is accurate or not doesn't necessarily matter all that much. What I found more interesting were the implications that this is not the first civilization-ending cataclysm that the Human race has faced (in the Galactica universe)...
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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I've got no problem with diverse divine powers and interventions, as I said earlier; when they fit into a context. In this case I get the impression that important contextual information is being held back to provide a season-ending zinger, and that's a fine storytelling choice, but it also affects how viewers might interpret things prior to that.
Like, OK, in Firefly's "Objects in Space" River's nutty strategm involved pretending she psychically merged with Serenity, and for a brief moment the audience wonders whether she actually did or not, because not enough episodes had passed to really nail down the overarching feels and themes and, uh, intents, of the show.
In other words, there's a difference between keeping part of the plot a mystery and keeping part of the, you know, nature of the show a mystery. Does that make sense? Like, if girls with six or seven fingers per hand are getting translated into heaven on The X-Files, you know how to interpret such events, because the show provided a context in which that could literally be happening, maybe. On the other hand, if the same plot shows up on that blind cop show, or Law & Order: N + 1, the audience interprets events differently and develops different expectations.
I'm not saying Battlestar Galactica shouldn't be running with this prophecy thing.
Registered: Mar 1999
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