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Battlestar Galactica Season 2 Premiere
fanblade writes "As if slashdotters needed another reason to stay home on a Friday night, the 20-episode second season of Battlestar Galactica premieres tonight at 10/9C on the Sci Fi Channel. The series, a 're-imagining' of the original 1978 TV series by the same name, made history as the highest-rated original Sci Fi Channel program ever. The first episode of the second season, 'Scattered', won't be televised in the UK until October, but I seriously doubt that will be a problem for the show that 'killed broadcast TV'. There's also excellent coverage on Wikipedia for those eager to brush up or catch up on the first season."
Lately there has a been a resurgence of classic sci-fi shows, such as this and Dr Who. While it is great to see younger audiences exposed to such fantastic television programming, I have to wonder what effect this will have on new sci-fi shows. Will we just keep rehashing the old (but classig and very good) series, or will new ideas and new series be able to develop? Will enough resources be spent by the networks and studios to promote the creation of new series, rather than just cloning the previous ones?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Seriously, though, I've been thinking about BSG ever since the conclusion of last season. Why so compulsive, you ask? Because the phrase "All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again" reminds me waaay too much of my workday...
PS: I think the Cylon meant Apollo.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Atlantis sucks...
... "Classified?")
:-)
the acting is on par with B-movies like "The Toxic Avenger"
Are you kidding me? How can you not like Dr. McKay or Dr. Zilenka(sp?)? Especially when McKay gets on Sheppard's case about playing "Captain Kirk" with the alien ladies? Or when Zilenka gives his whole speech (in Polish, no less!) about Atlantis rising from the deep? ("You didn't say anything classified, did you?"
Atlantis is great entertainment! Sure, it's not a gritty drama like BSG, but that's okay. Too much drama makes one depressed and boring. Try enjoying the lighter side of entertainment every once in awhile.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Season 1 was so dark and depressing that I could only make it through the first 3 episodes. Thankfully I found dr who to fill my sci-fi fix. Also the 'verite' style camera work didn't work for me.
music lover since 1969
Ouch, that hit kinda close to home.
Of course, with TiVoToGo, "watching TV" is just another label for me sitting in front of my laptop. *sigh*
But seriously (?), the new show is excellent -- give it a try if you can find the spare hour here or there.
Without having seen the first season (yet)?
I've heard nothing but good things about this show and I want to start watching it!
Execute? [Y/N] _
Maybe we should try locking any wikipedia pages before actually releasing the news post into the /. wild?
--Excyl
Had I mod points, you'd be getting one of the good ones. But the acting isn't as bad as the writing. It's just lazy most of the time. Someone comes up with a somewhat interesting plot idea, then they hand it off to someone painfully boring to write filler around it. I could write better dialogue if I hadn't slept in days.
Also, the Wraith are the most boring bad guys ever. They're entirely, "Aargh, we're miscellaneously evil! Aaaaaargh!"
Sadly, they occasionally spit out a pretty good episode, so I can't give up on it entirely. Also, I have nothing else to do.
A lot of factors go to the social makeup of who watches TV throughout the week. I think however the factor that sci-fi tapped into that's not sociological is the fact that all the other networks put crap on friday anyway.
On the other days there might be good shows a geek wants to watch. Don't make me pick between galactica and CSI, that would kill me to have to chose only one or the other. CSI wins out over stargate in my mind too, so why pick a fight you can't win?
So given a choice between crap and a fine sci-fi show, I'll pick sci-fi thank you. It makes the choice as to what to watch a lot easier for sci-fi fans who actually like more than just sci-fi.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Well, space simply isn't a desert, and there's not really any way that A) Hydrogen will be low enough near a star, or B) oxygen would be low enough near a star, or C) they wouldn't combine. It's one thing to require users to suspend reality and accept that there are genocidal robots called cylons and that people fly around in huge space ships but communicate by regular telephone wires. But to stack that with claims about the universe that simply aren't true is just going a bit too far for me. Even a region that is "poor" in ice will still have large amounts of it. If you can whiz around between stellar systems and land on almost any solid body of your choosing, you can get water, easily.
If entire episode plots based on pseudoscience doesn't bother you, good for you. For me, I don't mind a little pseudoscience here and there ("Captain, if we interject a tachyon pulse into the tractor beam, we might be able to escape), but don't base an entire episode on pseudoscience.
"/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit is a gimp plugin and must be run by the gimp in order to be used."
I re-watched an episode in HD on Universal HD.
:)
The problem I had with the HD version was that the '3-rd person' camera effect they use to simulate the viewer 'spying' on the action is too shaky to watch on a large screen!
Seriously, I was getting dizzy watching it on my projector (about 110"). I never noticed it at all on the 27" low-def screen my TiVo is hooked up to.
Well, maybe it's more of a function of large screen than HD per se, but I haven't justified replacing the small TV with a hi-def unit yet
I actually prefer it this way.
I've watched some Stargate Atlantis, but could never stick with it. There's no moral ambiguity in the show; the main character, the Colonel, responds to everything with a clear-cut moral choice. Everything has to be done based on principle - no compromise with reality, and it always seems to work out in their favor.
Battlestar Galactica portrays things in a much more "gray" way, forcing characters to make terrible choices where there's no morally superior answer (i.e. in "33" when they blow up the Olympic Carrier). This, mixed in with the Cylons looking like humans, feeling like humans, makes the entire of the show even more amigious, which is what sets it apart from most of the other shows on TV. There's no clear cut enemy - no clear "us" and "them," and thus, much more realistic. Even with the advanced technology/sci-fi nature of the show, it manages to portray human behavior/moral dilemmas much more realistically than the mainstream shows set in the present time on Earth.
I'll paraphrase a quote I heard from somewhere, "I'd rather watch plausible human behavior in an implausible setting than watch implausible human behavior in a plausible setting."
I know you're on a rant and I hate to slow you down but I'll try anyway. The galactica uses old fashioned phones with wires quite on purpose as a low tech but highly effective answer to technological warfare. It's much much harder to jam/intercept/alter a signal that runs through a shielded wire than one that transmits via radio wave. I bet if you go look at a modern navy vessel it will also use hard wired communications onboard ship.
Second, about the water. I hear what you're saying about water being plentiful, but there are any number of reasons why a large, relatively pure liquid body of fresh water is imensely preferable to what you'd find in asteroids etc... For one, it's one stop shopping. They don't have to spend precious time which they have none of to locate and mine H2O from a myriad of astral bodies. They don't have to mine squat actualy, just drop a hose and suck. It's very concievable that they didn't have the facilities avalable to extract H2O from any but the most simple source.
Think of it this way: When people first started extracting oil from the ground they looked for shallow sources of "clean" low sulphur low byproduct oil. Because the technology wasn't available to locate, extract, and refine anything else. Today they can drill miles vertically and horizontally and modern refineries can extra useable product from the nastiest of crude. The same can be said for water. Without sophisticated extraction and filtering equipment we wouldn't be able to use a large % of the water we use now because it's located miles underground in aquifers and needs to be cleaned by high-tech ultra efficient filtration systems. Now imagine that Galactica didn't get lucky enough to rescue a Britta(TM) FilterShip(TM) when they were running from the cylons in the first episode...
In other words, they needed easy water because they hadn't the time or the equipment to deal with the hard water...
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
The thing I dislike about both the stargates is they take 50 min to build up the 'problem' and have a quickie 10min solution at the end. I hadn't watched the stargates in a while until Atlantis premeried and I was interested in the premise.
I've watched season 1 and whatever seaon it was of SG1 and after 20 episodes or so of it that was the conclusion I came too.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Hmmm... because every SAM fired at an aircraft always hits? Because the radar guided AAA in the Gulf or Vietnam brought down a plane with every shot? There's such a thing as countermeasures, you know. If the Wraith have the technology to decoy your guided missles, which they certainly do, you are better off using weapons that at least go where you point them.
What's funny is that Europeans always complain about American prudishness but that steamier scene was cut for the UK version but not the US version.
Overall I liked the US version better (with it's uncut sex scene(s) and BSG profanity).
It's not: it's science fantasy. The script is awash with mystical references that make me wanna puke. They might as well have reanimated C.S. Lewis and put him to work in a darkened back room writing script for it, and I don't care for the result any more than I did Lewis' books when I was a kid.
Network TV will probably never have anything resembling SF ever again, but if this is the flagship that the Sci Fi Channel has to offer, I'll do without television altogether, thank-you-very-much.