Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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