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New Battlestar Galactica Spin-off Series Announced
An anonymous reader writes "The Sci-Fi Channel's hit series Battlestar Galactica may soon be joined by a 50-year-prior prequel series, called Caprica. To be co-exec produced by Ron Moore and David Eick, the new series will follow the tale of the creation of the Cylons."
Don't we write stories from the beginning anymore?
What?
You know adama wont die but thats about it.
Also regarding the prequel issue, lots of movies come about
world war II and are quite good despite people knowing
how world war II turned out they still seem to have good plots.
Will this one also feature the "edgy", trendy, subtly shaky camera work designed to give that "gritty, real-world" feel? Sheesh, it's overdone and hackneyed already. I think there's even software now that can take perfectly-filmed stuff and shakify it "for artistic effect".
So, after finally getting around to watching "Tooth and Claw" (Doctor Who 28x2), I am reminded of Gregg Easterbrook's discussion of (someone's, I forget whose) theory of the sci-fi "idiot plot," a plot which can only carry on forward motion if everyone involved is an idiot. BSG has been full of them, especially of late, with fantastic "should we ask him if he still has that bomb we know was ours yet is the only one unaccounted for? Naaaaaah."-related activities.
Why do I mention Doctor Who? Because it, quite simply, is not that. Star Trek (at least TNG) likewise rarely ran into this problem, so it's not just an american thing. But why do we buy into these plots? They're ridiculous on their face, yet we keep watching more sci-fi full of them. Are we that impressed by apocalyptic stories and high technology that we ignore the whole reason we're watching the show?
I just don't get it.
What is it with Hollywood's fascination with prequels anyway?
First there was Star Wars with Eps I-III, then there was Star Trek with Enterprise and the new proposed movie on when Kirk/Spock were in the Academy. And, now this.
I feel doing prequels is a bad idea and will never produce great entertainment.
There are three main reasons:
(1) Future is Known: Since the audience already knows what will happen to the characters in the future based on earlier movies, there is never that subconscious element of suprise. For example, no matter how much the main characters are in jeopardy, we know they will survive to justify their existence later in history. Writers basically paint themselves in a corner since they are bounded by the events that are supposed to come later.
(2) Risk to Established Canon: Sometimes the writers try to inject novelty by doing things that meses up the canon. They introduce things that no longer justifies what was established in the earlier movies. This leaves a bad taste in the audience's mouth because it invalidates everything they have come to believe. For example, the appearance of Borg on Star Trek Enterprise before the time of Kirk.
(3) Anachronistic Special Effects: Since prequels get made with special-effects technology that has evolved much beyond when the earlier movies were made, we end up seeing special effects and the general look of the movie not being in line with what we would expect how things would look in the past. For example, some of the consoles and user interface screens used by the cast in Star Trek Enterprise looked more advanced than the ones on Star Trek : DS9. This anachronistic anomaly again leaves a bad taste in the audience's mouths.
I feel Hollywood should abandon this fad of making prequels and just start making more novel sequels where what they can do is only limited by a good writer's imagination.
The article is rather scant on details, but includes this information:
I have mixed feelings about this spin-off. On the one hand, I have become more or less addicted to Battlestar Galactica and want something to tide me over until the third season starts. On the other hand, the plot of Caprica, as presented in this write-up, strikes me as cheesy. Is this a family feud? With billions of people in the twelve colonies, why does the Adama family need a central role in the new show? (Isn't one series enough? Was there a pre-William Adama back story in the original show or in Hatch's books? Being a BSG fan of only recent vintage, I don't know. This just reminds me of the 130-year McFly-Tannen conflict in Back to the Future.)
Battlestar Galactica is a riveting show. Hopefully its creators will achieve similar success with Caprica.
I'm most excited about meeting the first Cylon. In the series, the Cylons a sophisticated belief structure and a strange confidence in those beliefs (although we know they sometimes change their minds). We get to see a little of how Cylon society is structured in the second season, but there are a lot of unanswered questions. How did an artificial intelligence creat a monotheistic belief system? How did it come to believe anything at all? Why do Cylons believe they're God's chosen species?
In the director's commentary for the first-season episode "You Can't Go Home Again," Moore and Eick say that they think the key to a great BG episode is to give away secrets. There's a lot of secrets left.
I actually read something in a magazine a few months ago, and basically the reason Sci-Fi does the monster of the week movies is because they're so low budget but still bring in advertising. They cost under a million dollars a piece to make, and they run them a few times and probably break even pretty fast. I guess that's basically the bread and butter of Sci-Fi, it's version of "reality TV".
..."Battlestar Pegasus". Basically a way to leapfrog back and forth and continue the story at a faster pace (or, they could split the ships up from time to time). But this might be interesting.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Women can make good pilots, biologically.
Of course, brute strength does provide you with some advantage, but I'm pretty sure withstanding G forces is more about power/mass ratio than absolute power. I've noticed that smaller people tend to have the advantage there as well.
I had trouble with Starbuck's character at first, but nowadays she's pretty believable. My suspension of disbelief as far as her piloting skills is not threatened, though in some of the last episodes of the second season I thought her responses and inner turmoil were a bit overplayed.
And as far as that ship being a soap opera. It seems pretty reasonable to me. I mean, there were love tetrahedrons in my college dorm, and that was on a much smaller scale without the looming threat of humanity's doom. And as Wally said on the Dilbert animated series, post-apocalyptic dystopias lower girls' standards by leaps and bounds.
As "Battlestar Galactica" is about a lot more than space battles, "Caprica" will be as much family drama as sci-fi tale.
It is just me, or isn't there enough family drama on TV? Why can't we have more Space Battles??? I mean with quad dual cores for less than the cost of a compact car and the effects shipping as presets in most 3D packages, why not a space battle every show? At least 50/50?
Hmm, maybe a Spacebattles.com channel?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Thinking back to the miniseries, the schematic the guy in the space station had for the cylons were the centurions we knew from the 1978 series.
Does this mean the new series will have to go back to men in suits to maintain that canon? Or will there be new CGI-tastic cylons that are supposedly created for more mundane tasks that humans origonally used them for?
i.e. this show will be set before the cylons split off and created the centurions?
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~mlindsey/asimov/question. htm (the story)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question (about the story)
Vuja De: That sinking feeling that this is going to happen again. Often occurs in meetings with Product Managers.
Really, the episodes that have something to do with the main story are good (perhaps great), but the random episodes pretty much feel like "terrorist of the week" (you know, that thing we all hate Enterprise for, only substitute "alien" with "terrorist").
I think part of the craft of the writing of the show is the at-the-time-seemingly-random-event ("terrorist of the week") which several episodes later (or a whole season later) comes back up and reveals its tie-in to the main storyline. Best example: The nuclear warhead. Another strong example: The first episode with Zarek's rebellion definitely seemed like an isolated terrorist-of-the-week episode at the time, but it turns out those events were crucial to his involvement in the rest of the plot later, culminating in Baltar's election.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?