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Sci-Fi Channel Renews Battlestar Galactica
Chairboy writes "The Sci-Fi Channel has just announced the renewal of Battlestar Galactica for a second season. The creator of the show has announced that the second season will delve into the religious issues surrounding the Cylons in addition to opening up their society more. The latest episode had 3.2 million viewers, almost twice as many as watched the latest episode of Star Trek Enterprise." I said it before, and I'll say it again- this is the best Sci Fi program currently airing, so I'm happy to see more.
that the people tirelessly campaigning for the renewal of Battlestar Galactica have finally won, but "religious issues"? Is that really necessary in science fiction?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
but also the atmosphere I envisioned Enterprise as being; the primitive tech, the flights of patrol ships, the hard nosed military demenor. Enterprise just is not gritty enough for the time period it is trying to portray. The writers really should have taken a Q from the Earth environment of First Contact.
Now just do not pull the same crap you did with Farscape. One little mini-series to pull everything together that was not worthy of the established story line.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
I hope the fire the cameraman at least. Judging from all the swaying, he's apparently drunk all the time at work.
I also don't like the cheap soap opera-esque quick switching between face shots. A few seconds of one face at full screen and then switch to another and then back. Very annoying.
it would have that many viewers as well. besides, they get all the bleed over from SG-1/SG-A....
what does enterprise get? a channel devoted to black comedies.... last time I checked, the black community was not huge on sci-fi.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
My favorite piece of BSG's overall "flavor" is the incredible continuity they offer. I watched the miniseries and all thirteen episodes over the space of about two weeks (nobody's airing the show in this country anyway, as far as I know, so I don't feel very guilty downloading them) and it was like watching one incredibly long movie. No other TV show I've seen ever did this. I never watched B5 very much, but from what I did see, the story arc was there but the show itself was often very episodic. Farscape was very good with the continuity and story arc thing too, but it was also extremely episodic.
I think this "long movie" style of writing and plot development is really cool, and I hope they can keep it up in season 2.
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Haven't we moved on from self contained episodic plots like this? I gave it a shot, and found the whole series painful to watch.
Lets have a look at the politics - We have an exact carbon copy of the US system of government. The Galactica is an exact carbon copy of a US carrier. Why didn't they go the whole hog and set the show on an aircrft carrier on Earth. Call the Cylons "the terrorists" or something.
Then there's the self indulgent dramatic decisions, where they have to destroy a ship to save the rest of the fleet. Yeah, okay. Dramitic. How about not doing it every week. Admittedly they got over this one after a while.
Then we have the tacked on conflict beteen the Adama and the president. Always at odds even though there's never actuallly anything to disagree on, as well as the usual slew of cookiecut characters. We have the skilled commander who should have retired but ended up back in command, his son, and the awkward relationship they have, the fighter jock who can;t keep control of her temper, and the CO who can;t keep control of the figter jock.
Imean puleeze. How about some decent sci-fi. Something with some science fiction ideas.
You know that many people who are overly-sensitive "I'm too cool for The Man" atheists? Where do you meet them? Why are they offended by the very mention of God? Do they feel guilty? If not, then why be offended? Why not just live your life?
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
Yeah, but it's the BADDIES who are coming on all fundamentalist. The humans believe in the Ancient Roman gods!
That's pretty fascinating, IMHO.
What ever happen to the real story line? Back in the old days, the Cylons were actually a product of an alien race, not a creation of the human race. Starbuck was a cigar smoking, hard drinkin', womanizing warrior that was sort of a personal hero of mine. Boomer was an African-American guy. IMHO - I realize that the story is going to change a bit, depending on who tells it, but let's at least tell the right story. What has happened here is that the yo-yo that produces the show has decided to produce a whipped, whacked-off at the knees, politically correct version of the story. Personally, I hope that the show gets cancelled soon. I don't know if I can stand any more wasted space on the air waves.
Whilst I agree BG isn't really science fiction in the traditional sense, it's going a bit far to say that story lines should be an excuse for space battles.
A good story will always have depth... you'll empathise with the characters, maybe see a bit of yourself in them. The *point* of science fiction is the science of course, which is why it attracts the geek audience... we immerse ourselves in the world so much we can often work out how to solve the problem ourselves before the main characters do.
Never ending space battles would get a bit dull... you need other things like cool new tech, aliens with funny quirks, etc. - all the things that geeks are in to.
I think the major reason why the new Battlestar Galactica series has done well is one Ronald D. Moore, who I believe developed the new series and is one of the Executive Producers.
:-(
Moore wrote and/or was involved in many of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; small wonder why the new BG series has been much better than many people anticipated. =)
It's too bad Ron Moore wasn't involved with Enterprise, because Moore could have turned Enterprise into a potentially great series.
I've been a hard-core Trek fan for years.. I found it hard to get into Enterprise, but it grew on me. I'm not exactly sure which was the episode that Enterprise jumped the shark, but I sorta had the feeling it was starting to go the way the old Xenia and Hercules went, with the cross-overs, traveling into the future and such... Putting them on, on Fridays was proably what killed them. Sci-fi has "StarGate SG-1", "Farscape" (before the changed the lineout, they introduced "StarGate Atlantis", and now the rebirth of "BattleStar Galactica" I hate to say, that I've been watching the new Battlestar Galactica, and am really impressed. The changes in casting, puts a new twist on things, and I'm interested to see where the series goes. I'm probably going to take serious flamings on this one, but since they're reviving the shows I used to watch religiously.. I think they should look at remaking the British Sci-Fi series "Space 1999". I'm sure with todays effects and technology, Im sure it would give a few good seasons. I'd like to see what knockout vixen they'd cast to play that shape-shifter Miya.. Thats my 2 cents.. I'm punching out..
I think last week's episode which has Starbuck patching a Cylon ship with her jacket,
No reason this couldn't work, if her jacket was made out of the right material.
breathing oxygen out of a tube (lucky she didn't hit a toxic hydraulic line),
Luck has nothing to do with it. She had some magical oxygen tester, the little pen-like thing that she took out a couple of times, that told her what it was.
and flying the ship based on her "pitch, roll, yaw, power" mantra was plain silly.
If you're in a lot of pain and in a difficult situation, mantras like that are a good way to keep focused and thinking.
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The immediate future of television SciFi is niche channels. The staple of good SciFi is great special effects. Every year, it gets cheaper and cheaper to make effects that are better and better. The original BSG took the budget of a major network to put out. Now, a smallish cable channel can do a better job cheaper.
Back when the original BG series was in production in 1977-1978, it was exorbitantly expensive because you had to build models and use special motion cameras to film the models--a very time-consuming process. Given how good today's CGI technology has become with relatively cheap equipment, you can now do special effects vastly better than what was done with the original series at a tiny fraction of the cost.
I can cite another example: how to depict a mythological flying dragon on-screen. When Industrial Light & Magic did its work for Dragonslayer they built a "go-motion" model of a dragon and filmed it with special cameras, which required a long and time-consuming process to complete; 15 years later, Dragonheart did the same thing, but all completely done with CGI, probably at less expense per minute of film than the earlier movie.
The *point* of science fiction is the fiction. If I want to read science I'll pick up a text book. When I want a good story with a science backdrop I'll turn to science fiction.
Oh but I'm forgetting that right here in north america, maybe 15% of the populous are actually advancing technology while the rest just sit back and take everything for granted, or attribute their good fortunes to "god".
Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, Archemedes...
Most of the great minds in the history of science and mathematics were religious people.
Athiests tend to just sit around and write bad science fiction. That, or post flamebait on Slashdot.
To me, social issues, espicially religion, can be the most interesting aspect of sci fi. Anthropology is a science after all. Actually, it's the science I would have gone into if I could make the same moneny as I do in engineering. I'm not religious, but I love reading/talking about religion and how it affects peoples lives. It can be fascinating stuff. After all, more wars have been fought over religion, than science.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
I'm tired of the sci-fi groupies latching on to every new and terrible show that comes out.
The last episode I saw, Starbuck stranded on a planet, was terrible. The writing was bad, the acting was poor, and the camera work will make people sea sick.
Yes the production values are good but since when has production values been more important than the story.
Get this she, starbuck, flies a crashed ship that was designed to hookup directly to the nervous system of non-humanoid cyborg pilot, and you though case modding was hard. Not only did she fly it(by grabbing wires I guess), she out flew another pilot to the point of getting close enough to the other fighter to have that pilot read a message written in tape on her wings.
Simply a bad show. It's the sci-fi equivalent of Joey.
I have no
The point of science fiction is to create an environment in which the viewer/reader is enticed to explore issues that may otherwise be too difficult to examine under the harsh light of reality. Real human issues.
Take a look at Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." One of the subjects he discusses is that of marriage. Here and now, in the real world, we tend to view polygamy in a very negative light. In the world that Heinlein creates, we can view polygamy as a vital necessity within the environment, and we can do this without the guilt or preconception of our puritanical upbringing.
The "Science" part of science fiction is window dressing. It's cool, and it puts asses in the seats, but it is not the point. The science is just one of the tools available in order to create a compelling backdrop for exploring human nature; that is the point.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
You are attempting to draw incorrect parallels here.
A Tsunami is a very real significant threat that will cause some form of calamity that is very real and the results of which can be seen very quickly.
The Afterlife and whether or not one even exists, is open to debate, interpretation and is as amorphous as the person you happen to be speaking to at that moment. It is a theological, philosophical conundrum that humanity will most likely never be able to know the actual truth about.
The effects of a Tsunami aren't open to interpretation. The effects of the Afterlife and whether or not it even exists is so open to interpretation that it is impossible for humans to know the truth about the afterlife.
You may very well believe that your interpretation is correct and the only interpretation that is real. In the end, your interpretation could be completely wrong. When we die, we could end up in the Viking afterlife, where most of us will be nothing, as most of use arne't 'warriors'.
We could all end up in an afterlife where God asks us if we did everything we could to enjoy every hedonistic aspect that physical human life provides. If we say no, God might just send us right back with a 'Hope you figure it out this time' along with a wink and a smile. If we say, yes and God knows that is the truth, we might move on to some eternal paradise filled with sharing those experiences with others.
Whose to say I am wrong? In the end, if God really does exist, then the only being that can honestly say whether or not I am right or wrong is God. No single human being has that power and it would be incredibly arrogant for any human to assume they know God's motivations and plans.
If Christians believe they are right, that's fine for them. Just because they believe they are right does not mean they have the right to continually force those beliefs onto others. It is considered forcing those beliefs onto others by constantly and continually 'sharing' those beliefs with someone that has always said, "No thank you."
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I remember when Starbuck was charged with robbing the Bank of Hanoi when he really didn't. That was sad how he had to go on the run with his two fellow accusants. And then when they had to spring their friend out of the mental institution all the time...
Oh wait. Wrong show.
Actually, the latest episode of ST:Enterprise had 2.81 million viewers. Funny how that is considered to be 'low' ratings, while 3.2 million is a home-run for BSG? Enterprises ratings are right up there with BSG, SG1 and SGA. The only difference is Enterprise is on a 'regular' network, whereas the others are on a cable network. If Enterprise were on Sci-Fi, it would be considered a 'hit'.
the second season will delve into the religious issues surrounding the Cylons in addition to opening up their society more.
I wish they wouldn't. Am I the only person on earth who like the science fiction part of science fiction? The characters are interesting and maybe I'll care more about what happens to them later, but for now I'd like more fictional science in the science fiction...
It's a good show so far... But if it turns into another soap opera it will just get annoying. Why do these series all turn into soap operas? Two reasons: 1) it's a lot cheaper to film people crying than epic battles and CGI robots... 2) the writers run out of ideas quickly and never seem to go looking for new ones early enough.
Pat
But there are plenty of people who might be religious who aren't nut jobs. And because they don't get up in your face, you never know it.
If you're worried about this just being grist for the fundies' mill, don't worry. They can use just about anything to try to further their cause. Besides, why give them the monopoly on religious ideas?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I'm quite amazed to say not only do I like it, but I like it a lot more than the original. They're wailing on it.... The exterior shots are great: I've been complaining here and elsewhere for years that the dichotomy between "realism" and "what we're trained to expect" is screwed up in sci-fi films. The reality of sci-fi is, in a "space battle", *you're not farking likely to be outside watching it from afar, anyhow*... and if you could, you probably wouldn't even see anything anyhow... So the way they're handling it - lens distortion, blurring, grain, loose shots - it's a great feel. It's sci-fi, not a documentary. The acting has been surprising as well. I was s prepared to hate it after seeing what SciFi Channel did to _Dune_... but it's been very interesting how controlled and "seasoned" the acting comes off. There's some tacky things about it, but I'm enjoying it enough to overlook it. I'm glad it's been renewed....The only thing is miss is: "Byyyyyyyy youuuuuuuuuuuur commandddddddd" "Speak, Centurion!"
This is something that always bothered me about Star Trek; everything always happens within at most a couple of kilometers of each other.
And they still fire and miss, with shots that you should have been able to hit with manual aiming by eyeball. (I don't care what "jamming" may or may not be applied, a warp-capable starship should be better able to hit things than I personally am with a shotgun.)
As dramatic license it was merely silly, but as the series wore on it became increasingly clear that the writers actually thought that way. The "Insurrection" movie provided one of the clearest examples of that, with that silly "briar patch" that, apparently, was about 100 miles across, given the speed that they traversed it and how long it took them.
Riiiiiiiiiiiight. (And it's really, really dense and really, really big, so they can't go around it, but not so dense that it experiences gravitational collapse. Riiiiiiiiiight. I suppose Q put it there and sustains it with his hocus-pocus, it just never came up in the movie.)
Even Firefly, which I love, managed to sometimes feel a little claustrophobic (ships crossing between stars passing by within a few hundred feet of each other, a little strange).
I learned to tell time by watching the original Battlestar Galactica. It came on in Edmonton at 4:30 on Sunday afternoons. I remember many times looking up at the oven clock hands trying to determine whether I should be parked in front of the TV or whether I had time left to play with legos. When it wasn't Sunday afternoon, my friends and I would pretend to be Viper pilots and inevitably end up fighting over who got to be Starbuck and who had to play Apollo.
So, over the last twenty years, a certain amount of nostalgia has accumulated around Battlestar Galactica in my heart, not at all unlike most of us here. So when Ron Moore and the ScFi channel finally got the rights to the show, everyone was excited - until Moore said that, quite plainly, that avid fans of the original fan may not appreciate his version, what he called a "reimagining." Moore made a number of changes that bothered me, but the seemingly most significant tore at the core of my identity: Starbuck would be a girl.
Starbuck and Han Solo were about as close to being models for masculinity as anyone besides my father could get. Ask me to word associate manliness, and Starbuck would fall fairly close to the top.
And Moore had ripped that from me, from my heart.
So imagine my surprise when I watched the mini series and it was not only good, but great. And Starbuck was still, somehow, Starbuck. Baltar, for all his moments of brilliance in this series, was still goofy Baltar. The vipers were still there. Adama was still hard nosed. Yet, I had doubts whether someone could maintain this level of quality in a TV series. The original Battlestar Galactica certainly didn't.
So imagine my surprise - again - when the first few episodes, which I watched courtesy Internet, were even better than the mini series. In fact, this new series renders the original Battlestar completely irrelevant. I realize now that there are only a couple of good things about the original Battlestar Galactica now. First, it provided my friends and I uncountable hours of playtime. Secondly, it somehow enabled this new re-imagination. Even Richard Hatch, the actor who played Apollo in the original series, acts better in this new series (this time as a revolutionary).
To be fair, the original Battlestar is very much a product of late seventies television. I used to argue that it wasn't, but honestly - the show really was an attempt to bring Star Wars to the small screen. But if this new Battlestar had similarly been a product of the 00s, it would've been a reality show set in a business environment where Adam eats scorpions to impress friends.
This new Battlestar Galactica not only transcends the science fiction genre and redefines it, it also takes television a step further. Even my darling Firefly, in all its civil war cum scifi greatness, feels conventional when put next to Moore's Battlestar.
I'm not sure what it means if we have a generation of kids basing their masculinity on a female Starbuck (although I'm not so sure kids should even be watching this new Battlestar). Regardless of the consequences, Moore's new Battlestar is easily the best TV show on right now, and maybe even one of the best shows of all time. My wife and I have both cried and cheered during the show, and she usually reserves that for shows like Project Runway. During episode ten, I sported a broad, beaming smile in sync with the emotion on the screen.
It's that good.
Good job Ron and friends. You should be proud, you managed to pull off the stunt of making my male model a female, and make me happy you did it.
Ho boy.
You know, Charles Darwin almost went to seminary school before taking his voyage on the Beagle. References to a divine power as a guiding force behind evolution are all over Origin of Species.
Science and religion are separate, and since the Enlightenment people have held them as very distinct. Even Galileo said that "the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes." i.e. a person can be a scientific genius, and still admit there are things that we as humans don't yet understand.
I know it's hip to deride all faith as some sort of mass delusion that we need to outgrow, and that's fine. I don't have much faith myself. But faith and intelligence are not necessarily mutually exclusive things.
I'm not advocating anyone "get religion," but I do think that judging religion by its highest manifestations (art, literatue, etc.) as well as its lowest (the Inquisition, the Crusades, other favorite whipping boys of Christianity) is more broad-minded than simply dismissing religion across the board.
I also think it's unrealistic to think that human beings are simply going to "outgrow" faith, at least until we've become gods ourselves and can prove some form of life after death.
And personally, while I have no use for organized religion, I do like that Galactica threw it in there. Me, I always had a problem with shows like Trek, in which all human religions had apparently vanished overnight, and religion was presented only in terms of loony fanatics causing a problem for our atheist heroes. Yeah, that's an egalitarian vision of the future.
Small matter of potential vs. actualization, really :)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Yeah, because we all know that in real life a competent military organization would never leave a large stockpile of weapons and explosives unsecured even though they knew nearby enemy insurgents might use them to kill members of that same military organization.
I find this story point completely believable myself.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
The most interesting thing about religion is how it manages to survive in one form or another throughout so much change. One would think that humans getting such a handle on the science of life and physics would have obliterated religion, but it keeps on truckin' all the same.
... we'll believe anything, anything at all, simply to avoid facing up to that one unpleasant fact: we are mortal and one day will no longer exist. Worse, it won't take much time and change for the very memory of our existence to vanish.
... simply because those selling the belief in him offer the promise that "even if you burn in hell, at least you won't someday be not".
I disagree. I don't find it terribly interesting at all.
Human beings are expert at living in denial. This is hardly news, and in fact is a theme that has been beaten to death both in the sci-fi genre and in literature in general.
We are intelligent, self-ware, sentient creatures encased in a biological chassis that has a very short, finite lifespan, embedded in a universe of increasing entropy in which the most fundamental laws of physics insure that all life, no matter how sophisticated or "immortal" will one day perish.
There aren't too many people who can face that reality head on
The thing that makes religion so interesting in sci-fi is that you can explore the continuing tensions between technology and faith as technology evolves... seeing how the faithful adapt is very interesting fiction.
Again, I suppose it is a matter of taste, but I don't find the contortions people go through to avoid facing facts particularly interesting or riveting.
Faith isn't evolving. People's rational for denying the obvious, but unpleasant, truth of our own mortality is simply doing ever more creative acrobatics to avoid getting pinned down by cold hard fact.
Frankly, I see science as the interesting facet of science fiction, whether it is social science (what kind of a society will we have in the year 10,000?), physics, biology, astronomy, or what have you. Science actually reveals answer, some (like the ultimate expansion of the universe and ultimate death-by-entropy of all life) is unpleasant, but many are quite fascinating and who knows, mabye a way out of this entropic slide into oblivion will be found (presumably by exiting this universe). Not likely, mind you, but perhaps possible. Now that would be interesting.
As for the current state-of-the-art and future rationalizations people will come up with to deny their own mortality, I don't find particularly intersting. Amusing perhaps, like "what will they say when the very universe is tearing itself to pieces and life anywhere, in any form, is becoming untenable." Doubtless the promises made to the terrified masses will involve some kind of apacalyptic vision, followed by the return of a jealous, angry, vengful god. Which, if they're anything like us, they'll lap up.
That last is kind of interesting. The Judeo-Christian/Mormon/Islamic (and presumably Cylon) god is vengful, jelous, angry, and demanding. Yet people prostrate themselves to him willingly. Most of us wouldn't spend ten seconds in the company of a human being with those personality traits, yet billions of us flock to the idea of such a person having limitless power
Which really shows just how truly desperate we are to deny the truth of our own mortality.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Stop making day trips into planetary systems at sub-light speed
... hmm ... how to say this without spoiling the story for you? Let's just say that it's not necessarily the case that the cylon was there to kill him.
That's never happened. The planets are scouted by Raptors, which are kind of like Black Hawks. They are equipped with engines that can do the hand-waving "jump" thing they do.
Stop mis-using the camera work.
Meh. It's obviously a matter of opinion, but sometimes the difference between the right opinion and the wrong opinion is pretty clear.
The human is surprised, and yet still manages to pull off the first shot.
Has it ever occurred to you that the cylon was there to take Helo alive? Or, better, that he was there merely to
Never, ever, show someone stopping up a hole in a spacecraft with a boot or whatever that was, and then flying into space. That's just awful science.
Actually, it's perfect science. It wasn't a boot; it was a part of Kara's pressure suit. Obviously a pressure suit is air-tight. She wedged it into the hole to form a seal. Once in space, the pressure of the air inside (pushing at about 5 pounds psi, probably; that's about how we pressurized the Apollo spacecraft) will hold the patch in place. The pressure will not be enough to push the patch out through the hole, because the pressure suit is strong enough not to tear or deform under that kind of pressure.
And it doesn't even have to be a perfect seal. It's a short trip, and there's a big tank of O2 (comparable in size to a scuba tank) under Kara's left arm. A little leakage isn't a problem because the O2 is constantly being replaced.
There are a bunch of other really minor problems, almost all of which can be explained away by saying that the tech level is REALLY uneven.
Actually, they can be explained away by saying that it's a television show and that all things serve the story.
Religious questions are part of what makes humans, human. Every story delves into Religious questions.. Not to mention RIP off stories of the Bible and other religious doctrine (May I mention Matrix-Jesus parallels).
Here goes the explination for those who do not understand the purpose of the aspect of religion in BSG.
Years.. and Thousands of them ago.. Humans had a really plethora (weee) of gods. These gods were everywhere from gods of suns to gods of a single blade of grass. This was the system that existed for millenia.
Enter the Jewish tradition (mainly) which was the transition to One god above all others. A single god who rules all and is omnipotent.
The struggle between the NEW (one god) and the old (Multiple Gods) took place over hundreds of years.
We are the Cylons. We are that which was born from the previous. We are the worshippers of One diety.
I am willing to expect that there will be different sects in the Cylons comming up. You will see pacifist Cylons, and different types of interpretation Cylons.
--
After that.. lets talk about Religion in SciFi. All SciFi is a good story with some sort of Scienctific possibility placed into it. Bablyon 5 was a great series and they dealt with MANY religions including Christianity.
I remember when they greeted all the religions in one episode. It was impressive. Of course.. the entire series was based on The worship of the one, which was the Trinity in the end: Sherridan, Dylan, and the original B5 captain.
To ignore religious questions is to never ask WHY? why am I here? Why do I exist?
One day.. maybe Science will explain everything in this Universe. One day we may see that every question in the universe is answered.. except.
Why do I exist?
Thus.. Religion and the answers that come with it. Jesus, Mohammad, Zoarastrian, etc all answered these in what they wrote and did. Its part of how we grow.
I choose to try and follow Jesus' teachings because that is what I belive the WHY of my life is here.
Now.. I just gave you explanations and things to think about. No conversions tried, no pleading for you to believe in anything. If you are offended by what I have said. Tough. I feel more sorry for you because you have closed your mind to simple discussion.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!