Battlestar Galactica

Started by meatball, June 12, 2005, 09:40:42 PM

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MacGuffin

Quote from: RegularKarate on April 01, 2009, 01:23:26 PM
SPOILERS!

No way, this finale was a huge cop-out!

FUCK THIS SHOW!

Man, it started getting less than amazing the second season, then less than great after New-Caprica... once the "All Along The Watchtower" shit started, I realized it was headed downhill, but at least it kept redeeming itself occasionally.... BUT ALL THE PROMISES IT MADE FELL TO SHIT!

What a God Damned Travesty!

There were some good moments, but what an epic way to drop the ball.  Just kept getting worse until the very end, someone stuck a dick on a fart.

I did say it was suitable, not excellent. This last season felt squashed, and should have carried over to another season. Because at times, knowing the end was near, it was going back to season 2.5 tactics of things just appearing to sew things up. And I didn't like that their best character, Baltar, was so supporting. But I did like the finale, it was the best that they could do given what a hole they dig themselves into.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

SiliasRuby

It was a beautiful show. Something really to behold. Just finished it, early this morning. Really really worth the purchase a while ago and am so happy with an emotional payoff that finale was....
The Beatles know Jesus Christ has returned to Earth and is in Los Angeles.

When you are getting fucked by the big corporations remember to use a condom.

There was a FISH in the perkalater!!!

My Collection

Jeremy Blackman

So I just started Season 3, and wow. I was with the show completely, as casual but engaging viewing, but now it's taken things to a new level. I can't even describe how deeply Season 2's finale and the beginning of Season 3 are affecting me right now. I haven't felt something like this since the beginning of Lost Season 3 (fittingly enough).

SPOILERS

I watched the Season 2 finale last night plus the beginning of the next episode (definitely a mistake) and could not stop thinking about it all day today. So devastating, so bleak. I had almost convinced myself to take a break from the show because I couldn't handle any more. Thankfully I finished S3E1 and was rewarded with that inevitable glimmer of hope.

I love the moral complexity going on right now... that really is my thing sometimes. And it's so jarring to see these characters in radically different situations after soooo many episodes of nearly complete stasis. This is like a completely different show. It should feel ridiculous, but it feels so fracking bold. I love it. I hate it, but I love it.

Don't even get me started on the post-9/11 and Iraq War parallels, which are endlessly potent and somehow tastefully inconspicuous.

It wasn't even that long ago that I watched "Black Market." That episode was just... yeah... compared to this? I don't have words.

Taking a step back (and a deep breath), I may be at odds with the consensus here, but my favorite character is Starbuck. She's kind of like Hank on Breaking Bad. Started out as a bit of a stereotype but gained dimension. Also easily one of the top actors on the show.

Admiral Adama has to be my second favorite. Edwards James Olmos is probably 90% of it. He pulls off the nobility thing with such perfection, and his acts of principled defiance are so moving. (I'm thinking for example of the episode where he shuts down the witch hunt tribunal. I think I actually cried "yes!" at the screen when he told the lead investigator "you've lost your way" and ordered her arrest.) I am regularly surprised by how emotionally affected I am by this show, and Adama is a big part of that. He's the core.

Baltar is one of my other favorites, of course, because he's endlessly fascinating and so tragic, but I'm conflicted. Some of his characterization in Season 2 was bouncing around too much. They tried to give him motivation for wanting political power, and some of it worked, but they didn't really stick the landing. And it rang especially untrue when he sent the nuclear device as a present. Not even Gaius is actually that dumb.

My major problem with the show (and perhaps my only), from the very beginning, has been Six. For whatever reason her seduction schtick has never worked for me. In fact it seems strange and pathetic after a while. I realize that she appears mostly as a projection, and that whole thing is a function of Gaius's light insanity, but I can't help but feel like we're supposed to be seduced along with him. My reaction is more like, "Okay, really? Stop that. It's gross. Yeah I know we can see your back now and you're half naked, but really, stop making those faces. You're not the first woman to ever take her shirt off. Please stop rubbing up against Gaius now and let us move onto the next scene."

(Thankfully that's essentially disappeared now.)

Drenk

Season 3 is great. It was so good, I was in holidays, I watched it in three days. Episode 9 (Unfinished Business) is my favorite of the show, I think. I want to know what you think about it and the rest of the show!

And yes, Starbuck became Kara Thrace. She's the soul of the show.
Ascension.

Jeremy Blackman

(Well, look at that, this post is actually spoiler-free.)

I'm definitely going to savor Season 3. I can already tell how good it's going to be. At this point I would even accept a disappointing Season 4. My expectations have never been sky-high with the show, so I've really been enjoying the best parts with no baggage, and right now I seem to be in a stretch of uninterrupted magnificence.

I forgot to mention before, one of the best things about Adama, and Edward James Olmos specifically, is how he's able to pull off the most on-the-nose, earnestly noble lines without flinching. Here's a great (and very recent) example of this. I'll redact the other character's name for despoilering purposes:

Anonymous:  How do you know you can trust me? I mean, how do you really know?
Adama:  I don't. That's what trust is.

This would of course sound ridiculous coming out of any other actor's mouth, but he delivers it with this hardcore nobility that makes you want to cry. That is some kind of supernatural ability.

Jeremy Blackman

I'll start out spoiler-free...

I loved the finale. (It wasn't flawless in execution, but the show never was.) This is as good as BSG gets. It nailed all the big things, it felt right, it delivered on the mythology, and the epiphanies were brilliant. I couldn't ask for more.

I'm convinced RK's 4/1/09 post was an April Fool's joke, because it's exactly wrong. You're crazy, RK. Crazy.

NC and AATW are the defining achievements of Battlestar Galactica, and Season 4 was certainly the strongest season.

Season 2 was really mixed, with a whole pile of the show's worst episodes, but Season 3 took things to a new level. Again there was a mid-season slump, but then it pulled itself together for the end of Season 3, kept going through Season 4 and never stopped. Of course they had to throw in one stinker ("Deadlock"), but otherwise, like the entire NC plot, it was basically uninterrupted magnificence from AATW to the end.


MASSIVE SPOILERS

I could list favorite episodes, but it's really about those chapters that play out over 2-3 episodes.

1. New Caprica. That bold time jump, the invasion, the resistance, and the escape. Absolutely amazing.
2. All Along The Watchtower and Kara Thrace's return. I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff.
3. The finale, but really the last 5 hours of the show, "Someone to Watch Over Me" to the end.
4. Mutiny on Galactica. One of the most thrilling, frightening, and stirring chapters, and so well done.

My only complaint about the finale is that the final half hour felt rushed, but that part is actually growing on me. I think that's exactly how it would feel to arrive at your destiny so suddenly. Are we really here? Is this really happening?

I've never expected perfect logic from the show, but I am wondering how or if Adama got rid of his ship. And I'm not sure I feel totally okay about Adama's end, but it is what it is. Perhaps it doesn't bother me more because all their destinies are fulfilled.

Anyway, I loved the way everything seemed fated to come together, how one thing had to lead to another and another and another for things to arrive at that predetermined conclusion. That is some writing to admire. Particularly impressive was Tyrol's significant role (interrupting the transmission), which was a delightful surprise. And Kara's role, well that goes without saying... it was literally perfect. She even got to say "there must be some kind of way out of here." Brilliant!

But my favorite moment of the finale was the climax of the opera house sequence, where the Final Five were all lined up like that, juxtaposed with their glowing images from the dream. That was completely overwhelming, and I was so into it. I should have seen it coming, but I totally didn't, and it played as a crazy beautiful epiphany. Probably one of the most powerful moments of the show for me.

Oh, and if that wasn't already great enough. That cassette tape that Kara recovers from her old things is called "Dreilide Thrace Live at the Helice Opera House." And Kara plays All Along The Watchtower in the CIC, which is why the CIC is represented in the dreams as the opera house.

Also, Kara's dad was likely Daniel, the final final cylon (the one that Ellen describes as a sensitive artist). He and Sam probably played AATW together.

Mel

Did you see "Battlestar Galactica: Razor" film? This is my personal favorite and some of the darkest moments in the series. Discovering story of Battlestar Pegasus was great for few reasons. I was bit tired of what was going on Galactica, this gave series a bit of space. Contrasting choices of Pegasus and Galactica gave a lot of depth to moral choices, which occupied a lot of time in series. 
Simple mind - simple pleasures...

Jeremy Blackman

Razor was pretty good. I get more into the content that focuses on the mythology/destiny/heroism of the main players. But you're right, moral ambiguity was also something BSG did incredibly well. BSG makes Breaking Bad's moral ambiguity look like child's play sometimes. Particularly on NC, and in (SPOILER) Baltar's trial, I found myself genuinely confused about how I was judging the characters.

Jeremy Blackman

Apple Orders Ronald D. Moore Space Drama Series

http://deadline.com/2017/12/apple-ronald-d-moore-space-drama-series-1202227584/

Ronald D. Moore is heading back to space. Apple has given a straight-to-series order to a space drama from the Battlestar Galactica developer. The untitled project hails from Sony Pictures Television and Moore's studio-based Tall Ship Productions.

Created and written by Moore, along with Fargo co-executive producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, the untitled series  explores what would have happened if the global space race had never ended. Tall Ship Prods.' Moore and Maril Davis executive produce with Wolpert and Nedivi.

This is is the third original scripted series ordered by Apple via its recently formed worldwide video programming division headed by former Sony TV presidents Jamie Erlicht & Zack Van Amburg, joining a morning show drama series project, executive produced by and starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, which has a two-season pickup, and Amazing Stories, a reimagining of the classic anthology from Steven Spielberg and Bryan Fuller.

The Moore/Wolpert/Nedivi drama also marks the first series order for Van Amburg and Erlicht from Sony TV, which they ran before leaving in June to go to Apple. It reunites them with Moore with whom they worked on a number of projects while at Sony, including Starz hit series Outlander, developed, executive producer and run by Moore, and the upcoming Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams for Amazon, which Moore co-wrote and executive produces.

Moore started his writing career in the space genre with stints on three Star Trek series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, before he created the acclaimed Battlestar Galactica reboot. He is repped by CAA and attorney Ken Richman. Nadivi and Wolpert, whose credits also include FX's People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, are repped by CAA and attorney Tara Kole.