New Battlestar Galactica

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Anyone else disappointed with this show?

It started out great. The miniseries and the first season were excellent and I found myself totally wrapped up in it waiting for the next episode. The second season was hit and miss but overall OK until the middle of the season with the whole Pegasus thing then the New Caprica crapfest at the end. The show never regained its composure after that and continued to go downhill.

I mostly wrote the show off after the New Caprica episodes, that whole thing killed it for me. I mean they went from a day-to-day struggle for life and just skipped an entire year, changed all the characters' styles, etc... I never understood that. I continued to watch, although only half heartedly.

This all culminated in the the series finale episodes that aired last week and last night and they were just awful.

What a shame, it started out so promising. I would have posted this on the official forums but it seems they are deleting, banning, and handing out other crap to people who post negatively. Bunch of fascist zealots over there.

In truth, I don't get most of the complaining that's been done about the show... how it lost it in the 2nd season, then the 3rd season, then the 4th season. To me its been pretty darned good all the way through - some parts better than others of course, but not ever bad enough that I'd consider the possibility of no longer watching it. For whatever reason, on the internet, whenever there's a good episode, but not a great one, people start slamming it without mercy. Overall, I say it was darned well done, and not at all the garbage-fest I thought it would be when I first heard they were brining the show back. I for one am sad to see it go and thought it was one of the best things on TV of late (my other current and recently concluded favorites are Lost, The Wire, The Shield).

Don't get me wrong, even at its worst it was still one of the best shows on TV but it had so much more promise at the start. I think that's one of the reasons why it has been slammed so hard by fans. It was just such a disappointment that they were not able to continue the quality and style of the miniseries and first season which were really awesome for the most part. Then they switched things all around and it basically became a completely different show by the series finale. I think that's what got to people, they liked the original a lot more. Well, except for the fake shaky camera work, that really pissed me off at the start. They toned it down massively by the end.

Battlestar Galactica had a great first and second season in my experience. The third season started well, and I enjoyed Baltar's trial, but the fourth season has been terrible for the most part throughout. The highlight of the fourth season for me was the coup, which in the end while interesting, had no real impact on the overall story arc.

The ending was a total copout, and was the final nail in the coffin. It was all God's plan indeed. It's clear that no thought was put into how all the loose ends would be wrapped up until near the end of the show's production, and so the writers forced themselves into a corner where the final season had to be chock full of contrivances and character inconsistencies to get the plot to its end.

I think for the most part the 4th season was pretty good - I mean, it featured Starbuck back from the dead, Starbuck going mutiny on Laura, Starbuck captaining the garbage-scow, Tory killing Callie, Tyrol's breakdown and forgiveness of Baltar, looking for earth, mutiny on the garbage scow, the Cylons turning on one-another, resurrecting Deanna, almost airlocking the final four, the alliance with the rebel cylons, finding "earth", unveiling Helen, the aftermath of finding earth, Dualla's suicide, mutiny on the Galactica, Ander's getting lobotomized into a hybrid by a bullet (which is the mutiny episode's biggest impact on the storyline, not to mention that the ship is falling apart at the seams), the Hera/Watchtower/Starbuck/Starbuck's dad connection, and the finale itself. The only big problem I have with the 4th season is that basically all of the revelations about the history of humans and Cylons from Helen and Anders was done through exposition - they violated one of the golden rules - show us, don't tell us.

3rd season was also pretty good. The whole occupation of New Caprica, the resistance, Baltar's dubious choices, the rescue from New Caprica and the Adama manuever, the self-appointed trial of suspected traitors was a great episode, IMHO, Baltar on the base ship, the Boxing episode (I thought this was great, am I the only one? I loved how they intermixed Kara and Lee fighting with their encounters on New Caprica, while Anders and Dualla are forced to watch), the Death of Kat, the whole Eye of Jupiter episode, the Maelstrom episode for sure, and personally I liked the whole trial of Baltar arc, the way the "final four" were revealed and Kara's return from the dead.

Not so great parts of the 3rd season, IMHO - the whole plague episode, the Hero episode, about 3 or 4 episodes after the Eye of Jupiter stuff resolved that seemed like a lot of filler.

Anyway, I'll have to go back and remember what happened in seasons 1 and 2 .. it seems like so long ago now but point is that IMHO, the show really isn't as bad as people make it to be sometimes - for the most part it only dragged occasionally and to me it did live up to its potential for the most part.

I think the show was good, overall. I think I enjoyed the forst half of it more then the second, because I enjoyed the space battles, the mystery, and I was still in "survival mode" after 9/11. I also had more free time to watch it. The second half was good too, though. It just was different, it evolved and changed... but it bugs me a little that they didn't have the major things plotted out at the beginning...(the identity of the final 5, strbucks role, how the characters would end up...

None of the characters had much of a happy ending, some just seemed to sorta 'go off to die"... except perhaps for Gaius and Six, they seemed to be looking forward to their new life together...and helo and his family... the other 38,000+ had a "clean slate", though, a fresh start.

The finale bummed me out a little, but after watching it a few times, I feel better about it.


heh, one thing's for sure...

Watching older scifi shows is a bit hard to do, though.
BSG was gritty, and it set the bar high for future shows... mansquito just ain't gonna cut it.

There were some problems with certain episodes in the third season, for sure. You can blame Bonnie Hammer and the execs at Sci-Fi for that, though. They instructed the showrunners to make more "stand-alone" episodes, for use in syndication (figuring that some eps could be shown out of order that way). Problem is, BSG is a show with a heavy mytharc - you can't just interrupt the arc and expect everything to be great. So, they made "Hero", and "The Woman King", and that one with the virus that supposedly could be downloaded on the Cylon host's death - and after a few clinkers like that, the network backed off and let them get back to their damn show again.

The only issue I've seen people having with the finale that I can even begin to agree with is Lee's hippy-dippy decision to abandon all their tech and go back to the land (well, to abandon all the tech that people couldn't sneak by him, anyway). But that still makes sense for the character. Roslin observed, when she was directing Lee to create their new government after the Quorum Massacre, that he got so wrapped up in doing the Right Thing, he would forget to do the Smart Thing. (In the Rush song "The Color of Right", there's a line - "You're so full of what is right, you can't see what is true...") Well, looking back at the history of his people, on Kobol, on nuked Earth, on the Colonies, one thing they all had in common was refugees saving as much of their technology as possible, and rising to a high tech level while they were still spiritually incapable of handling that kind of responsibility. Obviously, then, the Right Thing to do would be to simply drop all technology, and hope that while it's being rebuilt, we can grow wiser. (The Smart Thing, of course, is to retain enough to see us through the tough times while we're still learning to be primitives, because it's all going to fall apart eventually anyway...)

I think the "problem" that some people have with seasons 3 and 4 stem from the change of threat from the Cylons. For the first two seasons, in addition to trying to find water, supplies, etc, the Cylons were a very real threat that everyone in the fleet felt was moments away from destroying the remnants of humanity. After the New Caprica incident, the motivation for the Cylons completely changed. Suddenly, they weren't trying to wipe out the rest of the humans. If they were, they could have easily done it on New Caprica. Suddenly, the Cylons are more interested in the final five, well, some of them are, and with controlling the humans. After the escape from New Caprica, the Cylons were as interested in finding Earth as the humans were, which really didn't make sense either. From the escape from New Caprica up until the point Cavil was interrogating Ellen, you really didn't know what why the Cylons were doing what they were or what their motivations were and they kind of disappeared as a threat.

Now, I still enjoyed the show, it's among my favorites, but I can't help but imagine how much better it would have been if they had brought JMS in as a consultant early on.

I loved the show the whole way through. Of course I dislike a few episodes, but in general it was phenomenal. I loved the characters and I never thought any of them were miscast. The storyline was incredible, and did a great job of showing ethical issues from both sides and generally letting the viewer decide.

It destroyed slick shows like Stargate for me the way The Dark Knight and Sin City have destroyed popcorn movies, it just showed depth and reality far better than the escapist heroes-always-survive storylines that drown television and films these days.

The only things I didn't like about the ending was that Starbuck just disappeared, we were left wondering exactly who and what she was, and we never saw Leoben. The rest of it was incredible, although I think they might have lowered the detail on some of the CGI ships during the first part.

Kara was exactly what she had been told she was - a messenger of It (It doesn't like to be called God, you know). She was sent back with one specific mission - get them all to the end of their journey, by whatever means necessary. It wound up requiring her to punch in jump coordinates based on Hera's dot picture, in turn based on "All Along the Watchtower" (and imagine what might have happened if Cavil hadn't dismissed her pictures as "just dots"!), then making sure that everyone she had any influence over reached a soft landing. When the last one, Lee, told her that he was ready to go on with his life, free of the burden of being an Adama, she knew she was done, and subject to recall at her Boss's whim.

I think it's pretty amazing, but I can sort of see why some people might not like it after a certain point, since it isn't what you think it is at first...or...well it...I don't know how to explain it.

I disliked about the ending is that there's no real explanation for Starbuck. Well, yes and no. I am completely in sync with her being an angel or a messenger or what-not. (it sort of ties into the whole being-of-light episodes from the original series) I am even ok with her showing up in the nebula in a pristine Viper. But what I'm not ok with is that there's no explanation at all of how her Viper flew into the maelstrom cloud on one planet, and the wreckage and her corpse ended up on Earth 1.0. IMHO, they should have at least provided some sort of explanation for that.

In any case, a shameless plug for my Starbuck tribute video (made a few weeks before the last episode aired) ...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16reu3Cy7I4[/youtube]

I will miss this series. I know "The Plan" and "Caprica" are coming out and quite frankly, I'm not hopeful for either one. I keep seeing "Crusade" and "Legend of the Rangers" rolling around in my head.

This was an awesome TV series and should be remembered as such.

I don't know anything about the new Battlestar other than to say I don't know what to think eh.

Those were Babylon 5 spin offs, right? Were they bad? I don't think I was able to watch Babylon 5 after season 4.

I did see a direct to DVD thing I rented from Netflix that was done fairly recently. It was pretty good I though. Kind of small, character pieces (mostly CGI backdrops really with a few characters talking-allowed them to do it I'm sure, since it would have been relatively cheap).

Crusade was a spin off series that was set up by the Babylon 5 movie, A Call to Arms. I really enjoyed that show, but apparently, it was canceled by TNT before the first episode even aired. According to JMS, TNT wanted the show to feature more sex and violence at the expense of the story and JMS refused so the show was dropped.

Legend of the Rangers was another movie that was designed to lead to another spin off but it was pretty bad so spin off was never created. I hope someday we get another trip in the Babylon 5 universe as it's still my favorite TV series of all time.