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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
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?
watch the pilot again- first minute.
The colonial officer is perusing plans of the original cylon model-- that looks like the original series model.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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
"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.
Obvious "hark-backs":
That's just off the top of my head.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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"
Ever notice how the Enterprise in Enterprise looked way more advanced that the Enterprise in Star Trek.
It got to be embarrassing. The original Star Trek bridge now looks like an outdated comm center for mall security.
The original Battlestar Galactica bridge from the 1970s was powered by Tektronix, and many of the controls actually did something visible. This was a real problem for the actors, who had to learn how to operate the systems.
"2001" was more futuristic. An AI took care of the details, and the crew just chatted with the AI.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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
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.