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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.
I remember whan Starbuck wasn't an overpriced coffee.
I was sure they'll cancel this show and replace it with some stupid bullshit whose target audiance can't operate p2p programs.
It reminded me of when I was a little kid watching stuff like Star Wars, Star Trek, all the old Sci-Fi stuff like MST/Lost in Space.
Just a good solid Sci-Fi series in my opinion, nothing over the top, knows what it is and doesn't try to jump ahead of itself.
Two thumbs up here.
All your base are belong to Google.
BG is dirty, gritty and believable. The religion question concerning the Cylons is interesting because in the original mini-series there were some references to God by the cylon woman which left me scratching my head.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
I don't get it, how is 3.2 millions almost twice the 2 StarTrek fans?
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
Yeah, I'm rooting for them, actually.
How long before we have a BG Technical Guide like the one for Classic ST?
Being in the UK I have seen all 13 episodes, the ending of season 1 is amazing, total shocker.
Jonathan
Love the new show and I'm hoping that it will once again regain a cult status with a new generation, allowing it to come to full fruition. Now with the mention of ST:ENT, I have to make a comment. If the people at the SciFi channel can make a Spin off of a spin off of the movie Stargate and revive a lond dead series, I'd like to see what they could do for ST:ENT. Then I would never have a reason to go out on Friday nights again!
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
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.
Religious issues in science fiction are the most interesting things you can look at. Warp core this, wormhole that, but the concept of the Jedis worshipping a dead religion is what made Star Wars (at first, anyway) so sticky for so many fans.
I can't wait to see how they go into this topic on the show... the tension between tech and faith is all the more interesting when the faith can be made up to suit.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Picard: We need those engines Now!
Geordi: I'm sorry captain, but I'm having trouble with (tech department, please insert words here -Ed.)
Good science fiction has less to do with cool spaceships blowing stuff up, funny/scary robots, etc. and more to do with people (or at least sentient beings with familiar aspects) - they're people in an unusual setting but the stories still need to be about people in order to be compelling/entertaining. Religion, politics, sex...these are "people issues" and just as much at home in science fiction as they are in any "non-science" fiction.
This remake of Battlestar Galactica has been constantly touted as just a drama, except set in space. While it does seem more human than most spacefaring series I've seen, I don't entirely agree with that statement; nevertheless, the tackling of said religious issues fits into the image that they're trying to portray.
Religion was a big factor in the original series as well, it just wasn't a specific plotline.
The original storyline was a retelling of a lot of Mormon teachings. For those who didn't know that, there are a ton of sites on Google that talk about it.
In all fairness Sci Fi Channel has promoted the dickens out of BG whereas UPN has done little to promote Enterprise. This is why I believe Enterprise has such low turnout. I say let Sci Fi channel promote Enterprise like they did BG and see what happens.
I've just posted this in another article thread but it's worth repeating I think. Science isn't limited to the physical sciences, it also includes the social sciences. The question of religion and the need to believe in something supernatural is arguably a topic for sociologists and psychologists. Now, whether or not you consider psychology and sociology to be real science or not is a completly different argument but none-the-less, I don't see why science-fiction should limit itself to discussions involving physics, chemistry and biology.
Tackling social topics in science-fiction isn't without precedent. Asimov's Foundation novels are good examples of science fiction stories where the central premise is rooted in sociology.
Bittorrent. Here: www.btefnet.com.
They're on the UK schedule so you can download the first 13 episodes at very high quality. (I hook it up to my 48" TV @ 640X480 and looks as good as Direct TV).
I live in Panama, so it's not like I can get it any other way.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
If you are going to rape reality in a television show, you might as well be hung for a goat as for a sheep.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Nothing is neccessary, but religion is a very traditional element in SF. After all, SF is about using ideas from science to be able to write directly about questions which are hard to aproach other than metaphorically in `mainstream' art (eg the nature of time, whether Vulcan women have pubic hair). Religious questions fit right in.
Consider more or less anything by PKD or H.G Wells or Stapledon. Or all the `Force' drivel in the Star Wars films. Or just about all of Babylon 5.
More specifically, one of the reasons for the existance of robots in SF is asking the question of what it means to be a person, and a good number of possible answers to that are the religious ones. The new Battlestar Galactica is all about that question (with some fun space ship battles thrown in), so naturally religion is going to turn up.
Not to mention the mormon connection.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
About frackin' time ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
the concept of the Jedis worshipping a dead religion is what made Star Wars (at first, anyway) so sticky for so many fans.
Really? I liked Star Wars for the special effects. The story sucked. The stories of all these "Big", Special Effects-filled movies suck. Or at least the stories of such Hollywood movies. I watch them for the SFX.
Have you ever asked yourself if androids dream of electric sheep?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Why? The humanoid cylons are almost indistinguishable from us, it's not unreasonable they'd have some kind of religion.
Religion is inevitable if you are self aware and mortal I reckon - it's a myth that makes dying a more palatable prospect.
Some spoilers below
Actually the thing I liked about the series was the idea that it is clearly inspired by the War On Terror. There are scenes where cylons do suicide bombings, claim that the humans 'worship idols' and explain that they don't fear death because their soul will get downloaded to a new body. It's not quite 72 virgins but it's close.
And fighting such an implacable enemy has a corrosive effect on human society too - look at the torture scene, or the way the military gradually seems to be gradually taking over. They even need to shoot down a 'hijacked' ship, which may or may not contain civilians just after the cylons devastating 9/11 style suprise attack.
And the nice thing about the series is that it seems to be generally interested in exploring this stuff with relatively rounded characters rather than settling for two dimensional 'good' and 'bad' characters like most sci fi.
So the religious stuff is pretty key to the appeal of the show.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
1) The Galactica somehow instantaneously achieves faster-than-light velocity from a subluminal start (which besides being impossible according to our science, means that the crew gets instantly rendered into chunky salsa if the inertial dampeners ever crap the bed).
Or 2) It accelerates from subluminal start to FTL, passing through C, which means that Einstein bites them in the ass as they whiz by and everybody gets a whole lot fatter (like Americans in the Red States) as they go. And the chunky salsa danger still holds true in this case too.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
UPN has dreams of becoming the next FOX or ABC or something. They're a long way from it, but their goal/hope is to compete with and dominate the other networks. Advertisers will judge a UPN show on how much of UPN's potential audience it gets. StarTrek failed on both counts for them. If the SciFi Channel comes up with a hit as big as the Sopranos or something, they'll be happy, of course, but no-one over there is seriously expecting that to happen, while at UPN, the suits will want to know why it isn't happening ...
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.
When creating StarWars level special effects becomes as cheap as putting together the set for Seinfeld or Friends, I predict SciFi will return to the major networks. On shows like this, the cost of some old furniture, some cereal boxes, etc. was hardly anything and most of the money went to the actors.
Take a look around: Complaining about Slashdot groupthink has been thoroughly assimilated. It's become so much part of the groupthink that you'll see it in every discussion and it won't cost or gain you much karma.
(Let's see how long it takes for meta-complaining to be assimilated.)
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.
Some folks further up the thread list had commented about the camera shots. I think the ones from space are what make the series so believable.
For example, in the opening show of the season, when they went to Ragnarok Anchorage to get supplies, when the shot showed Galactica appearing in the cloud after their FTL jump, all you saw was a little speck until the camera zoomed in.
If you think about it, that's exactly what it would look like if one were in space looking at the cloud and a ship did appear suddenly. Just a speck on the interstellar cloud.
The same can be said when the Cylon raiders appear. Yes, you see the flash but the ships are still shown as being specks until the camera comes in.
Keep an eye out for these kind of camera shots. They add to overall feeling that space is a vast emptiness (but you already knew that) with distances we don't normally comprehend here on Earth.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Okay, what's wrong with this picture:
* A Star Trek series is cancelled
* A Battlestar Galactica Series is renewed
* Jamie Foxx may win an Oscar
* William Shatner already won an Emmy, may win another
* Fox becoming the #3 network, ahead of NBC
It feels like I'm in some sort of parallel dimension. I keep expecting Rod Serling to walk out with some pithy comment about it all.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
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.
No, those aren't the only options. In fact there's a third option, precisely the one described by Ron Moore in his blog:
The ship remains stationary, but somehow manages to bend space around it. He used [now common] analogy of a ship in space being like a small object sitting on a peice of flat paper. If you fold the paper, everything 'on' the paper doesn't notice any difference, but once its folded properly the ship can punch a small [worm]hole so that it can move through the interstitial area between the [now closer] points on the paper. The ship simply ceases to be at one point, and appears at the next without any change in velocity.
Such a system, if possible, wouldn't involve any intertial issues.
"Stumble before you crawl"
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.
actually, if you read the book, the cylons were an alien race (not a product of).
Starbuck was a cigar smoking, hard drinkin', womanizing warrior...
Well, so far, the new Starbuck still is a cigar smoking, hard drinkin' warrior. To make the show interesting, the new Starbuck could still be a womanizer.
Boomer was an African-American guy.
So Boomer is an Asian chic now. Big Deal! I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is she is a cylon. I can deal with changing the gender and/or race. But making one of the original characters into the enemy?... that is a little hard for me to swallow.
the yo-yo... has decided to produce a whipped, whacked-off at the knees, politically correct version of the story.
Actually, I believe that they just updated it to today's world. Politically correct?... if you count changing the gender of Starbuck, they you may be right. Then again, changing the gender of Starbuck allows for more interesting plot lines (remember the womanizing comment above).
Also, how is it politically correct that someone has a drinking problem, someone has cancer and several characters have yet to let go of the death of a bother/son/friend? the yoyo may have made the characters on the show more like you and me... complete with flaws.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Blake's 7?
It gets my vote as the best Sci-Fi series of all time. Real characters, unstereotyped. You don't know who's "good" and who's "bad". Special effects show their age, but a lot less than other programs.
While special effects costs coming down will make it easier to fund new series, we really need to get over the obsession with "realistic" effects and pay more attention to the realism of the story.
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.
Do NOT download the bittorrents unless you want to get notices from BayTSP. I receieved one after downloading episode number eight. It is known that the Battlestar series is being tracked through bittorrent, so if you must use it, you'd be relatively anonymous.
"More human than Human."
Indeed, the Cylons feel that they are "Human 2.0" and therefore have as much problem genociding humanity as we would have, say, stepping on a cockroach.
I think the Cylons in this new Galactica series are showing the strain of their human roots. Keep watching...
Be who you are and say what you feel, because the people who mind don't matter, and the people who matter don't mind.
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
Somday, we'll find it.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
To find out more about the connection, look at this commentary. If you want more in depth information about the Mormons, look at mormon.org, an official "info" site from the Church.
Interesting to see the basis of some of the things in the show...
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
"Boomer was an African-American guy."
You're just reading someone elses hype. If you had ever watched the show back in "the old days" you would know that the humans in the show were not from Earth. Boomer therefore was not from Earth. Boomer had never been to Africa or America and could not possibly have been from either location.
For someone who's so uptight about someone elses political correctness, I'm suprised how misinformed you were on that count.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
The creators of Battlestar are urging people not to torrent the show, because if nobody's watching it on the actual television, it'll get cancelled even if half the world is torrenting the episodes. If you like Battlestar, do yourselves and the rest of us the favor of tuning in. It really is rather unfortunate, if you think about it, that the audience most likely to love this show matches up so well with the audience most likely to download it rather than watch it on TV.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
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.
Thanks. Whenever ones raves about how great this show, it's good to remind them that it copied a character from Startrek Voyager
I must have missed the bit where Jeri Ryan's character only existed in the bald doctor's head and tried to manipulate him into betraying humanity. So sorry.
Only if you're a religionist. For a rational person, I don't see the appeal? Science trumps religion. BSG examining religious issues is like if Star Trek examined issues surrounding the Pasteurization of milk. It's anachronistic.
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.
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.
Society hasn't really changed for several thousand years, it's just learned to re-adjust itself in the face of technological progress. That's what's fun to project into the future... how do we (or aliens for that matter) cope with the things we've created?
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Right, because, after all, sexy, partial-to-fully cybernetic women were introduced to science fiction by Star Trek. Oh, wait, not really, maybe it was in a little film called Metropolis frm 1927? Heck, it may have been before then, that's just the oldest reference I came up with on the spur of the moment. Grow up, trekkies - every idea in SF did not originate in the Star Trek universe (damn few did, come to think of it). Sexy cyborgs and robots were a staple of the pulp magazine years of the 30s and 40s.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
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
Actually Battlestar Galactica, originally created by Glen Larson (who is a devout Mormon) is heavily based on the mythos of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. http://www.proaxis.com/~sherlockfam/art5.html
Those humans that have been educated in what the science of life and physics has taught us have for the most part left religion behind. It is among the uneducated who have not been exposed to the knowledge revealed by science that religion is most prevalent. Science does trump religion, but only if you've been exposed to it.
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
Technology doesn't have any effect on religion. Smaller mp3 players and bigger TVs don't contradict the Bible. It's the understanding of the world around us that science reveals that contradicts the mythology of religion.
That is a fairly narrow view of technology - how about GM crops, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research, etc. I am not saying that these things are bad (or that I subscribe to a particular religion), but there are some advances in technology that can have huge moral implications and for a lot of people on this planet that means religion.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
I find this rather amusing, because the show Science Advisor, Kevin Grazier, gets scripts with comments from Baltar with notes like [tech] that he fills in with relevant technobabble. And as for his credentials, Kevin is also the red-headed guy from the JPL who has been explaining the various space probes on TV lately. Yes, he really is a rocket scientist.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
I don't find it surprising at all. First, I also support and accept science and all it includes.
But if you truely understand science, then you must also understand it's limits. Science does not trump religion.
The domain of science is:
1. What can be observed.
2. What can be experimented with.
3. What can be calculated.
Religion for the most part, and God in particular, does not fall into any of those categories. Thus science is not in a position to speak to religion, either positively or negatively.
The clashes mostly are really around when religion tries to impose ideas into areas that science covers. When some particular religious belief conflicts with a scientific concept, then you have conflict. But Scientist should only attempt to address the particular belief. It would be a mistake for scientist to attempt to go all they way into religious territory and address concepts such as God where there is no observation, experimentation or calculation possible. Science has no traction there.
You have to know where your ground lies, and defend that ground. But don't go where you don't belong. The central tennat of the scientific method is proof. Where there is something to prove, do it. There is little in the core of most religion that can be scientifically proved or disproved, so just ignore it. When you jump into the relm of religion where science doesn't cover, then you are just using your own brand of religion.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I just sort of stepped into that here, but I'll extend my explanation to address your issue too.
If your basic question is "Why do people belive in/need religion", then sociology and psychology may be able to answer it. But if the question is "Does god actually exist", then those sciences are no more able to answer than physics. If you ask a question that your science is not capable of addressing, then it is no longer a scientific issue. A lot of religious issues are outside of the relm of what science can answer, either physics or psychology.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
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!"
To elaborate: this style of filming (or shooting if you're in TV) is supposed to replicate our own eye movements. If somewhere were to turn out iris into a camera, (the idea is that) it would resemble Cinema Verite.
That said, most of us spend most of our day staring at a screen, so maybe that's why we find it so unrealistic. Also funny is that most of modern TV has, on one level or another, adopted this style of filming as well. If I recall for American TV, NYPD Blue was the first, but ER quickly picked it. It's just that this is the first time geeks have seen it used on TV.
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.
I always thought that the most inspired thing about the old series (horrid as it was) was how they invented swear words that were almost like real swear words (fraq -> fuck and they had another one for shit, I forget). This allows them to have realistic dialog (people, especially military people in combat situations, *do* swear! Shocking, that) without running afoul of the FCC or whomever.
I'm glad to see the new series carries this practice forward.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
And this isn't directed at you, but more at the general audience:
What kind of idiots are all of you people that you're taking a race count on the new show? Instead of looking at the new castings, and being awestruck at the quality of the acting (especially when compared to the original series (of which I am a huge fan, for nostalgic reasons)), you're concerned with the actors' races?
Jesus... Evolve people. Who cares what color they are?
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
There is nothing in conflict between atheism and religion. Only some religions are theistic.
None of the non-human religions in B5 are monotheistic that I can remember (who knows what the pakmara worship, except that it likes singing, and the Drazi presumably have a purple god and a green god and choose who to worship at random).
You could see the whole shadow war storyline as an attack on the stupidity of looking to a magical being to show you how to solve your problems.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
The latest episode had 3.2 million viewers, almost twice as many as watched the latest episode of Star Trek Enterprise.
Bullcrap. The most recent Enterprise episode 'United' had 2.8 million viewers. 2.8 * 2 = 5.6, not 3.2. Enterprise generally gets around 3 million viewers - the average for this season so far is 3.08 million (source). In other words... Enterprise would thrive on Sci-Fi. Or anywhere where it actually gets ANY advertising.
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
For the most part I believe you are correct. This is why religious beliefs cannot be true per se. Anything that is not just unproven but unprovable cannot be regarded as a fact. Such beliefs can also justifiably be regarded as irrational. Just like the belief in elves or talking trees or invisible aliens living in your backyard.
I think the confusion stems from the fact that religion is just a very primitive form of science. It is a pre-scientific way of trying to understand the world around you. If you can't understand something just invent a supernatural entitity who created whatever it is and controls whatever process you don't understand. It is really just a substitute for actual understanding.
The primitive hope is that if some creature is responsible for the life and death and fertility and crops and every other aspect of human animal life, that it can be controlled without understanding it just be asking the appropriate entity for mercy or help or kindness or whatever. There was a ST:TNG episode based on this very idea.
The difference between polytheism and monotheism is just that the polytheists believe (sensibly enough)in the division of labor whereas the monotheists believe that one entity controls everything. I guess the advantage of that is that you only have one person to ask favors of and the mythologies may be simpler.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Yes, but those movies weren't very popular.
How many of the blockbuster movies of the 90s will be remembered a decade from now the way we still watch Blade Runner or 2001 now? I don't think Armageddon will be held with the same reverence as Raiders of the Lost Ark currently is.
I agree that blind nostalgia for the days of yesteryear is usually replaced, but I have to admit that the blockbusters of the 90s were simply not very good. Their fundamental natures were changed by the Jerry Bruckheimers, the Michael Bays, the Roland Emmerichs. Despite this, I think that the situation has gotten better in the last several years.. now many blockbuster movies are true gems.. The LOTR movies, the Harry Potter movies, Finding Nemo, and so forth. We may be seeing a return to the days where high budget and high profile films have a degree of excellence to them, though we'll still have a number of bombs.. Emmerich and Bay still have jobs after all.
In the sense that science, by itself, can never "prove" to a delusional person that their brain is not, in fact, controlled through etherial waves from the planet Venus, you are correct.
Religion for the most part, and God in particular, does not fall into any of those categories. Thus science is not in a position to speak to religion, either positively or negatively.Wrong. Lack of evidence for the existence of God(s) through the advancement of science does speak to religion. To rephrase what you've said:
"Rationality is not in a position to speak to irrationality."To quote again: "It would be a mistake for scientist to attempt to go all they way into religious territory and address concepts such as God where there is no observation, experimentation or calculation possible. Science has no traction there. You have to know where your ground lies, and defend that ground. But don't go where you don't belong."
This is a variation on the "God of the gaps" argument that has existed since man started to see with instruments. Galileo was told he couldn't explore the heavens (and reach his own conclusions about heliocentricity) because that was "God's domain". Today, it's genetics, and to some degree brain science (there's some evidence that there is a "God center" to human brains responsible for "mystical" or "spiritual" experiences - but by your rule, we couldn't go there, because it's religious territory).
I think the potential of this shows is absolutely going to waste. Putting aside my ENORMOUS gripes about much of the show's premises (Oh no, humans built intelligent machines, so now they have to destroy all humans. We beat the Cylons 40 years ago, if we just leave them alone they'll leave us alone, oh wait, they just blew us up, etc. etc. etc.), this show just has far too many problems to be anything more than occasionally tolerable in its current state. My chief complaints concern some (though not all) cinematography elements, most of the characters, and the completely unbelievable scenarios and human interaction(yes, I know it's science fiction, a genre of the completely unbelievable, but I'm talking human decisions here, not creative fictional elements). First off, there are minor issues with the camera work in this show. I understand the shaky camera view trying to emulate a documentary style, but there's really no reason for this. Gorgeous scenes are ruined by gratuitous zooming in/out and the accompanying fuzzy focus shifts. There's also the previous discussed hopping between faces with little/no transitions in order to try and heighten drama. It's just a little tough to buy into why the show pushes this camera style. You never see any people walking around with cameras (aside from from the press in relevant scenes), so why waste our time on attempts at simulating a more dramatic scene than the writing supports? I think this documentary style is perticularly well suited to scenes involving cockpit views during space combat or even a couple of the ground chase scenes. In the end, the camera style is just a poor coverup for many of BSG's shortcomings. Then there are the largely awful characters. The cancer-ridden president who got the job because everyone else died. The alcoholic second-in-command. The largely forgettable fleet commander. The hotshot (moronic) pilot with something to prove (and of course it's a woman! Who's ever heard of a hotshot pilot with something to prove and wasn't a woman?). Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's reasonable to expect every character ever made to be completely unique and unlike anyone else. Formulaic characters aren't even necessarily bad when used properly. However, the characters of BSG are all so predefined it's laughable. In almost any given scene, it's hard not to know what character such-and-such is going to say to so-and-so about today's ridiculous situation. You always know when someone is about to be heroic or make some cutting remark or yet again point out who the real authority of the fleet is. I was a big fan of ST:TNG (until I saw B5) and an even bigger fan of ST:DS9 (until the finale ended in some pseudo-religious garbage instead of a spectacular fight). Each series had a number of characters that were largely formulaic but were actually extremely unique characters. Virtually every character in BSG sports the exact resentments and tensions you'd expect out of them. It's all very tiresome and dissapointing. Finally, there's the issue of the ludicrous scenarios and silly, unbelievable, and yet predictable human interactions. CPO Galen protects Boomer when she admits to taking detonators regardless of the fact that whatever her story is, she's putting the lives of fifty thousand humans at risk, including Galen's. Regardless of whatever sexual gratification he gets out of the relationship, it hard to accept that he would just completely cover for Boomer. Apparently nobody ever pays attention to Baltar, either, unless he happens to be speaking to that person at that exact moment. Sure, only the viewers know he's got some sort of wierd Cylon issue, but when a civilian scientist is on the bridge of a combat ship and is showing every outward sign of sexual activity, it's just not possible that someone wouldn't think it a little unusual and be suspicious. Every time Baltar speaks with a major character, his dialogue may appropriately match the conversation because of "creative" writers, but his ton