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Battlestar Galactica Gets Spinoff Prequel Series
It was recently announced that sci-fi remake series Battlestar Galactica is getting a whole new spinoff prequel series called "Caprica." Signed on for twenty hours worth of finished product, including a two-hour pilot, the new series is to be set 50 years prior to Battlestar Galactica, and will focus on two rival families, the Graystones and the Adamas. "Enmeshed in the burgeoning technology of artificial intelligence and robotics that will eventually lead to the creation of the Cylons, the two houses go toe-to-toe blending action with corporate conspiracy and sexual politics. 'Caprica' will deliver all of the passion, intrigue, political backbiting and family conflict in television's first science fiction family saga."
It'll be like "Dallas" or "Knot's Landing", but with spaceships? Wow!
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
They've been talking about Caprice since season 2 or 3. I suppose this is more a case of 'it's now got budget/go ahead' than anything that's going to surprise any fan that's been paying attention.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
...and will focus on two rival families, the Graystones and the Adamas.
Hmm. I wonder if one of them survives the Cylon attack.
This probably should wait until George Lucas is dead, just to be safe.
FRACK!
Presumably they're doing this because the last Galactica spinoff went so well? Invisible ships and flying motorcycles. How ever can they top that?
Now that we are in the past of the series, I wonder if we will get to see more of these Cylons that are faithful to the original series, and whether scenes like the destruction of the planet will be like the pilot to the original series.
Spinoff + Prequel all we need is an alien life form or a ghost that only the main character can see and talk to who only heckles the main character to make it a truly horrible idea.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Honestly, it's hard for me to drum up any interest in this at this point. The new BSG was one of my favorite TV shows of all time. It was truly amazing and I have loved it. HOWEVER, the Sci-fi channel has done almost everything in their power to crush my interest in the show. The between season and mid-season breaks since season 2 ended have just been utterly ridiculous. It's an exaggeration, but I swear it feels like I'm watching the last 2 seasons of this show at a rate of 3-4 episodes per year. I'll finish out what's left of the show at this point because I'm already embroiled. I'm not sure I want to endure getting involved in another series that Sci-fi controls though.
Personally, I'm far more interested in sticking with Terminator: TSCC so long as it maintains sufficient ratings to avoid cancellation. I only have room in my schedule to keep up with a few shows at a time anyways.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
It's reality TV from the fuuuuuuture. I can haaardly wait.
Episode 1: It begins with a street fight between the Adamas and the Capule--I mean Capricas. They try to marry off the young future commander adama but is turned down for not being gay enough for Baltar's grandfather.
Episode 2: Adama is asked to wait a few years and then go to a bar, where he'll meet his future lover, Tye, who unfortunately is also a Caprican. Angst results.
Episode 3: Adama professes his love while standing on a balcony having a conversation with his mother about toaster studels. Tye overhears this, and they agree to a civil union. The rest of the Adama family hears of this and declare war on the Capricas. They're so distracted that they fail to realize the toasters have become sentient. A trail of burnt strudel leads to the outskirts of town.
*six month break due to writer strike -- online commentary -- this plotline SUCKS!!! It has a political agenda! Doom upon the soothsayers* ...
Yeah, I can see it now. Now watch me get modded "-6000, damn slash fan"
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Romeo and Juliet . . . ? Seriously, I mean, it's a spin off of a remake of an old show, but due they have to use a description that makes it sound like there is NOTHING original about it?
This is old, old news... 3.5 years old, in fact.
you had me at #!
This thing sounds so gay it makes my rear hurt. Whatever happened to the simple concept of a bunch of people in space and scantily clad women blowing up a bunch of fracking toasters. Give me some liberal preaching and moralizing every now and then, that's cool over a drink, but at the end, I don't want to watch a tv show about someone else's mental problems. I vote for Bush twice and I have enough of my own!
This is my sig.
The ultimate anti-thesis to creativity. A prequel to a remake of an existing IP.
It happens way too often for my tastes. Watered down entertainment from chicken writers not willing to go out on a limb.
"the two houses go toe-to-toe blending action with corporate conspiracy and sexual politics"
I wonder if it's going to be as good as when it was the Harkonnens and the Atreideses.
Another brain-damaged gaggle of entertainment industry parasites have rehashed an old idea in the hopes of inflicting it on a witless populace.
The Day The Earth Stood Still?
King Kong?
Star Wars XI:A New Source Of Revenue?
No, Battlestar Galactica: The Prequel.
pfft.
From Battlestar Galactica to the new series and Caprica...
This reminds me of the transition from Star Trek to Next Generation to Deep Space Nine.
"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
Define "recently." We've been hearing about Caprica for a year now. Anywho, it should be interesting.
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
The single most boring thing about the new Battlestart Galactica series were all the philosophical / internal-conflict / interpersonal-power-play scenes which were used as cheap filler (no FX = cheap) in between the action scenes.
Now they want to do a series which consists almost entirely of cheap filler scenes???
The 1980s are calling and they want their Dallas clone back ...
Once the last cylon is revealed, the first season of the new spinoff will be a lengthy debate about what the definition of "Not in your fleet" means.
... with sexy results.
Game... blouses.
Sounds like a cross between Dune and Star Wars Episode 1.
With all the fast-moving action of the former and all the rich storytelling of the latter.
Apparently, Slash articles need to have pre-posting supplemental research/vetting/URL-add-ons before going into the wild:
http://www.galacticawatercooler.com/
Then, it might have read:
"Previously-announced BSG-Prequel 'Caprica'green-lighted"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Anyone else think the whole BSG storyline would have been a lot more interesting if the time between the 1st Cylon war and the current series had been something like a few hundred years? Maybe even a few thousand?
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
Yea right.
They still can't make sense of the last series b/c they messed it up so bad -- they kept telling us they had a plan, oh really? what "plan"? it was a random mess.
And Boomer and clones got so "fraked-up" I don't think it's even possible to square it with any logical consistency.
BSG no longer falls under SciFi, it's FrakedFi.
:T:R:A:N:S:
io9 has been reporting on Caprica since at least January, if not earlier. The real news here is that SciFi's ordered up a full season, even though it hasn't aired the pilot yet.
This could be a rash decision on their part - the series pitch is loudly devoid of anything that's made the rebooted series interesting (namely, spaceships and explosions), instead loudly billing itself as Dynasty in spaaaaaace.
I don't know about you, but my gut reaction to this is a bored "next!"
If the story gets over its pretentious pretext and goes somewhere interesting - like, say... the first Human/Cylon war, then I'm in. Otherwise... what's to distinguish it from the umpty other dramas out there, aside from (one would hope) an sfx budget?
I am so excited I could hardly care less!!!!
Lost in Space (also 1965) -- John Robinson, his wife and three kids.
Plenty of "families" in SF, depends how you define "saga", which on TV usually means "multi-generational soap opera". If so, not really a drawcard, I think.
Apparently, Slash articles need to have pre-posting supplemental research/vetting/URL-add-ons before going into the wild:
Then it just wouldn't be Slashdot ...
you had me at #!
Sure, they CALL them seasons, but if you think about it what we're really getting are UK-length series* of the show, mislabeled.
Think about it.
Series 1 : 13 episodes, Jan-April 2005
Series 2 : 10 episodes, July-September 2005
Series 3 : 10 episodes, Jan-March 2006 # called "season 2.5" for the DVDs and considered to be "second half" of season 2.
Series 4 : 20 episodes, October 2006 - January 2007 # called "season 3," the only time the new BSG has run in anything approximating a traditional TV "season" form.
Series 5 : 10 episodes, April-June 2008 # called "the first half of season 4"
Series 6 : 10 episodes, January-?? 2009 # called "the second half of season 4"
* UK TV shows don't run in seasons, they run in "series" (eg series 1, series 2, etc. as listed above), typically of 1-10 episodes... though for British comedies, 4-6 episodes is considered a "series" - compare to the US "season," which typically consists of 18-22 episodes. Imagine waiting 46 weeks to get your weekly dose of Red Dwarf (or No Heroics or The IT Crowd or whatever).... it kinda makes the several-month gap between BSG series look positively brief.
next up buck rodgers. bee dee bee dee bee dee
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The Harkonnens still hate the Atreides, Reverend Mother Gaius (Gaius? Hmm...) Helen Mohiam keeps her gom jabbar close and her pain box closer, CHOAM controls a whole lotta shit, the Spacing Guild refuses rides to people who aren't freer with their spice, and they still make many machines on Ix.
Maybe THIS is the way they intend to bring a passable Dune movie to the screen when everything that has come before is stunningly and embarrassingly opus fail. Call it BSG and get rid of all the internal monologues and the sandworms.
Happened it did, embarrassing it was. Search your feelings, young Skywalker... you know it to be true.
*self realization hits*
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Hey, does anyone know if they dismantled the flight-capable motorcycles that they borrowed out of the CHiPs prop room?
"One of the network's frustrations with [Battlestar Galactica] has been its dark and increasingly complex mythology."
If *that's* why the network was frustrated by the show, then the network is run by morons. The dark, complicated mythology is part of what made the show so good. Multidimensional characters with complex motivations were a great added bonus to high quality, space-based visual effects.
The frustrations that *should* have been keeping network executives up at night involved huge downtime between seasons. That, above all else, is what caused viewership to decline. People simply lost interest in a show that appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be canceled every year. People were actually surprised when the next season began, and had already decided to watch something else.
Granted, season 3 lost a lot of credibility when the space opera turned soap opera (that season sucked really bad), but the main problems came from scheduling mismanagement by the network.
But no occassionally naked Trisha Helfer, so I won't be watching.
Now if they could get all the hot women from that show to be on Caprica, I'd be a very happy fellow.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Spoiler alert... So they got to Earth and it was nuked and uninhabitable. I thought that was only the first half of season 4. They said that "everything will be revealed." Where the hell are those last 10 episodes?
http://www.tvsquad.com/2006/11/01/more-news-on-battlestar-galactica-spinoff-caprica/
Great, twenty more hours of shakey cam to get dizzy to.
It's too bad they didn't apply this film-school-grade technique in post-production digitally, so they could later re-release a collectors edition, minus the crappy shakey cam. I was so excited about BSC, but can't watch the show, the shakey cam is too distracting. Let your actors and your plot wow your viewers and set the atmosphere, not your wobbly camera. Sigh...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
When B5 got into its stride, DS9 got into the story arc business and largely out of the NG inherited planet of the week plot.
While not a classic series - how could it be with the incessant mood swings of Avery Brooks and almost everything involving Quark or Jake Sisko - it had some periods approaching greatness (Improbable Cause/The Die Is Cast, Call To Arms/A Time to Stand). But then Babylon 5 disappeared onto TNT and DS9's writers had several brain farts (such as Ezri Dax and Vic Fontaine) and that was that.
Who's going to keep Moore and Eick from making Caprica a Bionic Woman sized disaster?
If you are in the States, watch BSG on hulu.com
Spoiler alert... Darth Vader is Luke's Father (NB: Actual spoiler changed to protect the innocent - but you get the gist)
Thanks - I'm in the UK, don't have Murdochvision and had 'negotiated' the Season 4 DVDs for Xmas.
Generally, the idea of writing "spoiler alert" is to at least put a fracking blank line between the "spoiler alert" (or maybe, you know, put it in the fracking subject line) and the actual fracking spoiler so those of us who can read without pointing at each fracking word in turn can avert our fracking eyes in time.
Frack frack frackity-frack!
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Dude... put some fucking newlines between "Spoiler alert" and the actual spoiler. People usually scan a couple of words ahead before they register their meaning, and by then it's too late to block the spoiler. I would have liked to see the season before knowing the conclusion. Thanks a fucking lot.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
i remember reading about this months ago... slow news, slow news indeed...
BSG has become crap. Sure, the story's great and I want to know what's happened, but the characters are so flawed (and *only* flawed) that they're not worth a shit... it's so sad that I couldn't care less if all of them die. The only character worth anything is Helo -- the single character that has some principles and sticks to them. The rest are annoyingly arrogant, self-centered, self-serving morons.
Now they want to do more of the same, but without spaceships and explosions?
I've managed to hold out until mid second season, but then I had to give up. My head was starting to hurt.
Turning it into "Religious Fanatics in Space" didn't really help either.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If you want to do a spin-off right, it should really have something to do with the original show. Now there have been exceptionally successful spin-offs, mostly American comedies. (I say successful in that they ran a long time, making no judgment on quality.) In fact, it's often surprising to find out which show they spun off from. Frasier came from Cheers, Jeffersons came from some other show that you wouldn't have thought of, Laverne and Shirley spun off of something else, Mork and Mindy was based on something else. But then there's also all of the really crappy spin-offs that simply could not stand on their own two feet, just like a band that works because of all of the members coming together and the solo acts never have that same magic after they split.
The thing that's always funny to see is when something is spun off in a completely nonsensical way. She-Ra was a spin-off of He-Man. What were they thinking? No boy worth his salt is going to play with a girl's toy and why would the girls want to play with something tied in to a boy's toy? And as far as this goes, we're taking a spaceships and robot scifi story and spinning it off into a soap opera? I mean yeah, there are some soapy elements to BSG already but this really does sound like Dallas in Space (except they never travel off-planet.)
I don't get it. The Paramount suits said they'd never do a show on a space station becuase that's like taking the wheels off the cart, you never go anywhere interesting and it would require a lot of contrivances to get interesting things to come to you. I think the more appropriate complaint would be setting a show in the Star Trek universe in a restaurant in a backwater town on Earth that doesn't get much traffic from offworlders. Yeah, look at this big neat universe we're not seeing!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
until the final five got revealed.
We will see human personalities downloaded into a human like Cylon after Zoe Graystone dies in a terrorist attack. Then Zoe-R will be the prototype for the human Cylons. 50 years before the fall of the Twelve Colonies.
The Adamas will most likely be opposed to the creation of the new Cylons and feud with the Graystones who created them, but they have Graystones involved in relationships with the Adamas to make it more complex.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Who cares about two families fueding?
Without Tricia Helfer what is really going to be worth watching?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...please no... BSG2K(c) was bad enough.
In the context of the cancellation of Stargate Atlantis and it's replacement with Space: 90210, Sci-Fi can shove Caprica and Sanctuary where the 3 suns of Tatooine don't shine.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
In other words, all the boring parts.
Wonderful.
If I wanted Desperate Housewives in Space, I'd...well...I...
The new series started out with such a bang, and devolved into some kind of retro-90s self-indulgent pseudo-moralistic narcissistic tripe. This we need more of?
Let's get back to the basics guys: less red dress, more red blood.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
and get all this today: "all of the passion, intrigue, political backbiting and family conflict in television's first science fiction family saga".
In "Terminator", you've got a half-crazed mother, a rebellious teenager, a scheming uncle from the future - and a female robot who wants to seduce the teenager. Currently, you also have said teenager running around with a girl who happens to be a plant being run by a rogue Resistance fighter from the future who's trying to off the female robot and who's screwing the uncle. Bad news coming down! Somebody's gonna die!
Can't beat that for fun.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
In the pilot when they fly the Vipers around the "museum" as a demonstration, the theme music from the original series plays for a bit.
In the show, it's the Colonial anthem. When Adama tells everyone about Earth, he recites a line from the opening narration and identifies it as the first words of their scriptures.
As a Sci-Fi fan I think it would be interesting to see the time leading up to and including the first war with the Cylons. Not just the development of the Cylon technology, but the action of the battle. If it just becomes a Sci-Fi Soap, then I'm not sure who the audience is....
Think Deeply.
Yep, that was my immediate first reaction, too. How could we not think that, though, considering the way the announcement was worded? Suppose they might have even plagiarized some of the old copy for Dallas when they sat down to write that?
Caprica 90210
That is the Cylon race of reptiles that created the cybernetics of the same name. The reptiles went extinct, but the machines carried on.
Putting the words or phrases "Polly Walker, sexual politics, grappling with love sex and politics" in one article... Excuse me I have to go to the bathroom.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
finally. something to watch.
Like BJ and the Bear?
What? There was a third season? I thought the series ended when they settled New Caprica!
I was walking through the mall connecting two Las Vegas hotels with my brother a few months ago when a someone asked if we have "a few minutes to watch a program". After signing up, we were in a room with two TV sets, holding a pair of buttons on cords - press the green one when you liked what you were seeing, the red one when you didn't. That red button got quite a work-out. After the sucking stopped (nearly an hour later!), we answered an electronic questionaire where we could explain why we thought it sucked, and in what ways. I took it as the opportunity to mention other non-dreadful SF programming like the new Doctor Who. In brief, I hated every character in this show and didn't much care for the actors playing the characters. If I ever see an episode of it again, it will be far too soon./pP
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
This series has been shooting in Vancouver, BC since the summer. They shut down some streets around where I worked for some shooting.
I'm not sure why this is being posted now. But the public needs to know!
I actually liked DS9, and consider it generally the best of the ST series. Not that it wasn't guilty of some heinous violations (like Vic Fontaine), but some of the episodes were among the best written and performed of any ST series, and could even get me to tear up. (I'm thinking of the show, "The Visitor." A very moving episode.)
What are people liking about Galactica NT?
It is a series about a bunch of spaceships full of retarded idiots, so stubborn, unpleasant, unfocused, no planning, blind and arrogant that I would join the cylons in the instance to whipe out that insult to intelligent life.
The old Galactica had its moments, was fancy and had surprises, but Galactica NT is just a remake of a brasilian telenovela which added spaceships.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I think this is definitely true. I don't watch a lot of TV and I bought the first 3 seasons of BSG after a friend recommended it. I've enjoyed it, mostly for the drama, and I'll probably buy S4 when it's finally available just so I can see how it ends, but there have also been a lot of inconsistencies that I've found irritating or confusing.
This isn't exactly a new thing, though. It goes right back to the first season when we were shown that Cylons were clearly biologically different from humans (glowing read spine, etc), yet creating a "cylon detector" is such a difficult thing. I never really understood the whole Cylon Detector plot, which at the time seemed like an excuse to give Baltar something to do and create conflict with other characters. After seeing season 3, I now think that's probably exactly all that it was... lazy design of the details and hoping that things would make more sense later on. Baltar's a really fun character and it's interesting seeing him weasel his way around everything, but early on the character didn't really have much to work with so they just made up something empty.
I think the plot problems are because the writing team never really figured out any solid rules or boundaries or what would happen to begin with. The writing of the drama and character development is often pretty interesting and it's what keeps me watching the show, but the plots and details often seem as if they were just tied together to create an excuse to be able to have something fail or work as the writers want it to. As you've said (I think), it's like technobabble solving the problem, but with all the extra meaningless dialogue to go with it. Instead, they just let crazy and irrational details get in and don't even try to explain them.
If you compare BSG to something like Babylon 5, I think B5 would easily come out on top (at least for the first 4 seasons), despite having been one of the first series of its kind to actually experiment with a major story arc. B5 had all the strong drama and character development of BSG, but JMS also put so much effort into defining much of the relevant stuff about his universe to a needle's-width before he even produced the first episode. He knew what the rules were from the beginning, and 4-5 years in advance, he knew how all the main parts of his story would fit into the rules.
DS9 started to lean serial at a time when it was a big no-no to do so. Now we have these kind of shows (Lost, Prison Break, BSG, etc.) left and right. I always thought the serial nature of the latter half of DS9 was its strength. Many people hate shows like this - I love them and hate "episode of the week" plots. Consequently, DS9 is my favorite Star Trek. Maybe it's because I like reading books and heavily serialized TV shows are like having a story read/acted to you.
I was disappointed when Season 3 of BSG went episodic at the behest of SciFi. Straying from the serial nature of Seasons 1 and 2 was retarded; after all, how did they think it got where it did in ratings, magic? It's too bad they broke its momentum. Season 4 starts to get away from some of that BS, and hopefully it'll finish out they way it started. I can't really understand the hate so many people seem to have for new BSG and their undying love of the original.
this is my sig
this story was reported 3 years ago, but still hasn't come to fruition
More like: ...
4. GreyStones Wars
5. The Greystones Strike Back
6. Revenge of the Adamas
7. Profit!
1. Make up some cheesy name and add in some REALLY annoying characters, which results in angering all current fans
2. Somehow STILL Profit!
Karma: NaN
You wait? You actually _wait_??? Have you ever heard of EZTV?
You wait? You actually _wait_???
Yeah, see, when something as high-quality as BSG comes along I do actually believe that the makers deserve some money in return. Crazy, I know.
If the GP had actually had something insightful to say about the end of 4.1, rather than gratuitously dropping a big frackin' spoiler-bomb for no adequately explored reason, then I might have been more sympathetic...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.