Slashdot Mirror
Battlestar Galactica's Last Days
bowman9991 writes "If your country was invaded and occupied by a foreign power, would you blow yourself up to fight back? If someone pointed a gun at your head and threatened to pull the trigger if you refused to sign a document you knew would lead to a hundred deaths (and you signed!), would that make you ultimately responsible? Does superior technology give you the moral right to impose your will on a technologically inferior culture? You wouldn't expect a mainstream television show to tackle such philosophically loaded questions, certainly not a show based on cheesy science fiction from the '70s, but if you've watched Battlestar Galactica since it was re-imagined in 2003, there has been no escape. The final fourth season is nearly over, and when the final episode airs, television will never be the same again. SFFMedia illustrates how Battlestar Galactica exposes the moral dilemmas, outrages, and questionable believes of the present as effectively (but more entertainingly) than any documentary or news program. It's not hard to see parallels in the CIA and US military's use of interrogation techniques in Bush's War on Terror, the effects of labeling one race as 'the enemy,' the crackdown on free speech, or the use of suicide bombers in Iraq."
In the beginning I really liked the show. It had a good mix of action, technology and drama. However, the last few seasons have been fairly "meh" for me because it has turned almost completely into a soap opera. Don't get me wrong, the soap opera stuff is OK but now there very little of the original mix that attracted me in the first place. It's just not the same show that it started out as.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I was a kid when the original BSG was on in the late 70's, and so remember it fondly (I can still remember how sad I and other kids were when they cancelled it). And when I heard they were bringing it back as a miniseries, I was skeptical to say the least. My first thought was "Jesus, can't Hollywood come up with ANYTHING original anymore?" and my second thought (after hearing that Starbuck and Boomer would be female) was "Oh great, and they've made it politically correct too, even better." At that point, I vowed I would never waste my time on it.
Then a funny thing happened. I was flipping around and caught a bit of the miniseries, a way into the first night (just after the nukes hit). It was the scene where Helo and Boomer put down on Caprica for repairs and are faced with a mob fleeing for their lives. It was one of the most powerful and dramatic scenes I had ever seen on television. The contrast with the original, where the colonials seemed to forget that their entire civilization had been wiped out almost immediately after it happened, was just stunning. And the obvious connection to 9-11 was immediate and visceral (I don't think this series could have been made before 9-11, certainly not with this kind of gritty realism).
From that point on, I wasn't a skeptic.
And just when I thought I had seen the best it could offer, along comes the first season and it somehow managed to get even BETTER. The premiere episode of that season ("33") was absolutely brilliant, "Hand of God" was touching and dramatic, and "Kobol's Last Gleaming" bordered on an almost mystical experience (the opening to that two-parter has to be the harshest montage to ever grace a television screen).
Now, the series has had its ups and downs since then. They've never again equalled the quality of the miniseries and first season, IMHO (though individual episodes like "Flight of the Phoenix" have come close). But even at its worst, this is still the best thing on television.
This skeptic will miss you greatly. Nothing else even comes close.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yeah, that's called "realism." People in real life often rarely grow sufficiently large backbones to "do the right thing" either, particularly when they're threatened and running for their lives.
And, as for secrets, is there any one of us who doesn't carry a TON of those around with them? Do you wake up every day and tell your wife that she's become a fat, bitter shrew and that you don't want to be married to her anymore because you want to go find a cute younger woman who isn't a fat, bitter shrew? Do you tell your kids that you're disappointed that they're not as smart or handsome as you'd hoped they'd be? Do you tell your boss he's a fucking idiot and that you think you could do a better job than him? Do you tell you mother that you don't want to visit her or call her because you're too different from her now to have anything to talk about? Do you tell yourself that you're not the hero of the story, just another loser in a world full of losers?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Sure, if you're a soldier fighting in a standard 'symmetric' war. On the other hand, the kill ratio in Iraq for coalition forces is 100:1 (1 coalition soldier dead for every 100 enemy combatants). Numbers like that make suicide bombing start to look pretty appealing.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Man, I wish that were a joke, but it just isn't. The series producers have admitted that the whole "and they have a plan" thing was added "because it seemed cool."
In fact, if you listen to the episode commentary, quite a bit of things were done "because it seemed cool." Boomer being a Cylon? "Because it seemed cool." The whole thing with the second Sharon and Helo on Caprica? "Because it seemed cool."
The writers have never had a real plan and have been playing the entire thing mostly by ear. And it shows: the "and they have a plan" thing has just vanished. What is that plan? Did they give up on it? Why didn't they finish wiping out the human race? (Problems with Cylons procreating, apparently?) What's the deal with the human/Cylon hybrids (versus the Basestar/humanoid Cylon hybrid)?
I will give them credit, though. They've managed to take the identities of the Final Five Cylons in the most recent episode and make them make sense. Sure, not everything is explained yet, and there are remaining questions, but at least the idea that they're Cylons doesn't seem completely implausible any more.
Hopefully they'll find a way to tackle some of the dangling threads and finally figure out what the Cylon's plan was. Because they sure don't appear to have had a plan in the series so far.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I wonder, given that we had two bombs that we were pretty sure would work, if we had dropped the first just off Tokyo (ok, not "just", but within sight, but far enough away to spare most of the population) on a lightly populated island or something, if Japan would have surrendered, or was destroying a city or two necessary?
Regardless, your points all still stand.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I don't necessarily dispute you here, but what can be done when you are faced with such a lesson, other than learn it?
I would probably argue that in the case of WW2, the "lesson" the Germans learned wasn't that "Americas guns are better than yours, therefore suck it for eternity," which is the "lesson" the Germans were trying to teach France, the Austrians, Serbia, the Israelis, Palestine etc. (I guess there's a lot of room to argue about the last one, but I find the intents of both parties completely out of joint with their actions so its hard to debate it reasonably.) The lesson the Germans learned in both world wars was "We the world won't tolerate your hegemony and will fight to stop it," which is something most Germans already knew in their moral hearts but the principle required demonstration.
Either way, turning "killing for political purposes" into "teach a lesson" is pretty Orwellian and I'd like to avoid the whole construction, since it's a literary trope masquerading as an ethical principle.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Now you've verged into one of my pet beliefs: that movie and TV SF (let's call it "science video") can never be "real" SF in the sense that (for example) Heinlein is SF. The problem with SV, as with all movies and TV, is that it aims at a mass audience in a compressed format. That means thoughtful exposition and intellectual complication, which is how the genre engages most of its readers, are off limits. Indeed, many people who work in the media don't even have the background to do it properly.
One reason I became a rabid trekkie early on was that TOS went further than any previous SV in trying to be real SF. One of their best inventions was Spock, who's a genuine alien, not just because he doesn't look human, but because he doesn't think human.
And yet even this key character is not carefully thought through. In an early episode, we're told that this guy's physiology is so alien that McCoy's instruments go wild on him. Later in that same episode, we get a melodramatic scene relating to his relationship with his human mother! Apparently nobody had the background to appreciate the inconsistency between these two facts. Or probably somebody did (TOS had some good scientific advisers) and the producers said, "Whatever, we need that bit of drama near the end, we're not looking for an audience that will know the difference."
Another example: Star Trek has always followed the convention that space fleet officers have naval ranks. But they've always carefully avoided the dual use of the word "captain" that's standard in real world navies. (In English-speaking countries, "captain" refers both to a rank equivalent to an army Colonel and a commander of a vessel, regardless of rank. In one of my favorite naval historical novels, The Sand Pebbles, the Captain of the U.S.S. San Pablo is a Lieutenant J.G.) A small complexity, but apparently deemed beyond the capacity of TV audiences.
Though I've always thought that this complexity was stomped on after the fact. Notice that in TOS, Kirk wears wrist insignia that anybody who knows naval ranks would recognize as a futuristic version of the "one and a half rings" of a Lt. Commander. That's about the right rank to command a ship with 400 people. But officially that's insignia of a Captain and all the other officers (regardless of rank) wear a single ring. Right.
And of course, we don't even want to talk about sound in a vacuum....
I've thought a lot about this situation, and on reflection I think the way it went down was probably (as horrible as this sounds) a best-case. Nuclear weapon technology was coming. The soviets were going to have it eventually, we got to it first and we dropped the only two we had.
If we hadn't done that, imagine how many might have been mass produced by the WW2 industrial war machine. Now imagine a world where no example existed of how incredibly mind blowingly horrible these weapons are. Imagine an exchange of dozens or even hundreds of these weapons launched by clueless political idiots who had no idea what they were playing with.
Those victims in Japan are heroes on the stage of history. Their deaths, and the suffering of the survivors, is all that stood between the humanity and the long winter.
Or at least, thats how I look at it.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Never following the BSG before, couple of days ago I taped the whole day of last season's episodes, and was relatively amused by it until the expected, but always disappointing happened:
1. Scene A: Guy got shot in the knee, blood all over, open wound and fractured bones close up, as realistic as it can get, well done, you did the good job, I feel little sick.
2. Scene B: Cute Indian actress, love scene with ex-president-turned-saint, about to undress, I feel better already, okay, she is undressing, removing last garment possible... and silly me, seasoned to realism, open fractures, blood and guts... expecting to see a tiny little bit of otherwise shapely acress' body... ah silly me... no realism here.. all we will see is standard issue bra and nothing more, because:
2.1. Blood, open fractures and guts, is good for you
2.2. Women breasts, is bad for you
And this happens over and over and everybody just whistles and pretends all is good and does not care and instead of having a realistic realistic tv, we have half realistic tv, and for other half we must all hide and sneak into wast expanses of silly and often extreme fields of what is referred to as porn...
Oh yes, Georgia.
The microscopic mountainous country that, with some guidance of US, managed to alienate not one but three of its provinces (all three unrelated and not particularly friendly to each other) to the extent that they had to actively seek secession. Then, after years of a stalemate, Georgia government decides that the only way to fix the problem is to fire rockets at residential areas of one of those provinces' capital. All the while the same ethnicity in a similar province in Russia does not have a slightest problem with being a part of the larger country.
US propaganda tried to show you a different picture of what happened before the war there, didn't it?
NATO expands to countries that want to ensure that have nothing to fear from other NATO countries, and support if they get involved into a conflict with non-NATO countries.
None of those countries had a chance to enter into any armed conflict since the end of WWII, and certainly aren't going to have such a chance now (being mostly surrounded by EU members or having a border with something obviously peaceful like Russia or Ukraine). Georgia had conflicts, and that was the reason why it was not allowed into NATO. Speak about only getting something you don't need.
There is a reason that much of the expanding NATO is doing, invovled adding former members of the Warsaw Pact.
Yes, and the reason is, US wants to feed its military contractors and control foreign governments.
However, I do not argue that the US military-industrial complex has used NATO to expand. But That does not mean that NATO was not important, or does not still play an important role.
It doesn't.
However the fact that NATO never accomplished anything other than feeding said complex and involving foreign countries in various failures of US foreign policy, very much does mean it.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.