The Science of Battlestar Galactica

gearystwatcher writes "TV science adviser Kevin Grazier talks about getting rid of the Trek babble in Battlestar Galactica. From the article: "Grazier's job was to help keep the technology and science real and credible — even when there were some massive leaps. Grazier didn't just make sure that there was a reason for what we saw — bullets instead of lasers — but also that when the science bit did break into the open, it was more mind-blowing than the writers could have conceived — such as when the humans discover their mechanical Cylon persecutors have evolved to look human.'"

Comments

Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

The networks keep canceling all good TV shows and instead keep crap like American Idol and 90210 alive.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[roc97007]

Someone still hasn't gotten over the cancellation of Caprica.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[QuantumBeep]

The series ran until the story ended, then it ended. May god grant that happens more often.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Yvan256]

He's right though. It's not just about Caprica, it's about TV shows which require a minimum of brain cells to watch.

Reaper (CW), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Fox), Better Off Ted (ABC), Heroes (NBC), Caprica (SyFy)... I've heard rumors about Stargate Universe being cancelled too.

Reaper was a lot funnier than Chuck. The guy doing the devil was hilarious and hated at the same time. I hope he gets a devil role in a future movie.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles may have not had a lot of fans, but those who followed the story really want a proper ending/tie-in with the movies storylines.

Better Off Ted had a lot of good nerdy jokes and references in its first season but went a bit too mainstream for its second season, that's why ratings went down. You can see it happen with the fake Veridian commercials. The first ones are clever (friendship: it's like stealing), the last ones are just stupid.

Heroes... why did they cancel that? Is there not enough viewers that can follow a story told in a few years instead of a few minutes?

Caprica... we know what happened, the story was about filling in the details, which we'll never know. It sure didn't get cancelled because of the decors, special effects or actors IMHO.

Stargate Universe was slow to start (hey, the damn ship was falling apart), too bad too many viewers stopped watching. Their loss may end up being everyone's loss.

And those are just from memory, I'm sure a lot more good shows have been cancelled in the last decade.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[plover]

The series ran until the story ended, then it ended. May god grant that happens more often.

Amen, brother!

Too many people are still overwrought about cancellations of great shows, like Firefly. The thing is, if they kept riding that horse, it'd just have ended up becoming another Star Trek Voyager.

Could they have filmed another season's worth of episodes? I'm pretty sure they could have written some really excellent ones. But there likely would have been a few stinker episodes. Season 3? Not so much. By season 4, it'd still be a good show, but showing wear around the edges.

As it was, they went out in a blaze of fandom glory, shining all the brighter for having done so. Enjoy the memories, rewatch the DVDs if you're bored, but move on.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[RsG]

I think it ended rather poorly, but hey, that's just my opinion.

In the science department: No, BSG wasn't as bad as star trek, but neither was it good enough to deserve acclaim. It was, by the end, about B5/Firefly level, maybe a little better in some areas and worse in a few others. To wit:

1. Unobtainium. I realize Tylium was a holdover from the original 70's BSG. But they displayed it having a range of properties that completely exclude it from being any real life element or compound. It would have been trivial to give Tylium the properties of either Deuterium or Helium-3, and simply work from the assumption that the protagonists have different words than us for the elements. Hell, "frak" already established that the writers were ready to sub in one word for another.

2. Magic. B5 and star trek have been guilty of this too. Is it too much to ask that a sci-fi series stick to a rational universe? Or at least leave sufficient ambiguity that the few supernatural events might have been natural ones instead?

3. Space combat. This one is kinda a case of rule of cool. Realistic space combat wouldn't look like much. But really, the ranges involved in BSG are much too short, both for weapons fire and for targeting/detection.

4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support).

Other than those 4 things, the series wasn't bad, science-wise. I'll give free passes on FTL and generated gravity, as those are virtually prerequisites for the type of setting involved. It may have been the first soft sci-fi series to employ concepts like mind uploading as major plot elements. Concepts like the Galactica being minimally automated made sense in context. They actually addressed realistic details like the number of survivors dwindling and running out of resources.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Heroes

Because, after a truly phenomenal first season, the last season or two was quite dreadful. It seemed clear that they didn't have a story to tell - you seem to assume they were really building towards something of note - like the end of the first season, opening of the second. It sure didn't feel like that to me.

As a fan that watched every single episode, I thought it was ready to be cancelled.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

So say we all!

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[AdmiralXyz]

Can we please talk about the "the networks cancel the good stuff and keep the crap" spiel that I see every single time Slashdot or Reddit or whatever starts talking about television?

Networks are businesses: they exist to make money. Network executives are not evil men who... well, OK, they are evil, but not in the way you think: they don't say to themselves, "This show is much too intelligent, it might awaken our viewers out of their drunken stupor, cause them to realize that corporations like us are the reason for their miserable lives, and spark a revolution! Away with it!". No, what they do is say, "This show is losing money, not enough people are watching it. Away with it." That's their job.

And don't talk to me about how the Nielsen ratings don't accurately reflect viewership, and how Firefly was actually this smash hit being watched by gobs of people around the country that Fox somehow overlooked. You know how Serenity did at the box office, the movie that all the fans were supposed to go see multiple times to convince Fox to bring the show back? It didn't break even, even when you factor in DVD sales. You're not as numerous as you think.

If you want to complain about bad television being the norm, you need to go find people and convince them to watch your favorite show instead of { watching crap like American Idol, pirating the show off the Internet, doing intellectually-stimulating or otherwise rewarding activities besides TV }. Lousy television is their fault, not the networks', the latter is just giving people what they want.

Lord knows I don't want to sound like I'm sticking up for TV executives, but it pains me to see this same crap appear in the comments every single time, when people could actually fix the problem if they were willing to make the effort.

Frothing rant over now.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[khallow]

4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support).

Once you give ships self-repair capability or a good deal of intelligence, "living" ships are a natural extension. It may be cliched beyond redemption, but it's not that great a stretch.

My personal peeve is using boat physics in space. There's a natural "up" direction, ships bank when they turn, and ships top out at a maximum speed.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefly ended before the first season was done and was broadcast partially out of order.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[peragrin]

true but there were so many pauses in the series that many stopped watching.

Seasons 4 was separated by what 9 months? more.

TV shows that are popular but the networks don't like get all sorts of random stupid things, night changes, forced show changes, etc.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[NoSig]

Heroes devolved from a series about a super hero showdown to high school drama at an actual high school with the plot seemingly generated at random. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was the best TV in a long time, unfortunately the whole setup reeks of some half-effort crap that's just there to sell a movie - until you actually watch a few episodes to prove that wrong. It's a bit how Batman: Arkham Asylum was a tremendous game, but it might easily have been passed over because most movie tie-in games suck. I enjoyed Caprica, but I can easily see how many other people wouldn't. It was too all over the place - while much better than Heroes, it shared that flaw.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[RsG]

Once you give ships self-repair capability or a good deal of intelligence, "living" ships are a natural extension. It may be cliched beyond redemption, but it's not that great a stretch.

Except that's not what's being addressed here.

I will grant that a ship with sophisticated self-repair, artificial intelligence and the ability to communicate is very much like a "living ship". It also won't bleed if you shoot it, nor does it have a spongy mass of brain tissue at the controls.

The kind of living ships you're talking about, where repair nano-tech and advanced computing are invoked, is more often found in written science fiction. And is just fine as far as hard science goes.

What BSG, B5, Farscape and some of the latter additions to Star Wars and Star Trek involve is ships made of living tissue. And that makes no sense whatsoever. It's like the writers somehow got the idea in their heads that flesh can be engineered to extreme levels of durability and regeneration, or without the limitations of conservation of matter and energy. It ties into a fundamental misunderstanding about the capabilities and limitations of evolution and life in general.

Want to see a ship made or organic matter? Wooden sailboat. You'll note we make our warships out of steel, and would continue to do so even if we could make a wooden boat that healed.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[c6gunner]

Considering the ridiculous ending that they came up with, I rather wish The One True God had aborted this series a season early.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Junta]

I wouldn't say any of those represents shows that 'require a minimum of brain cells to watch. I don't see the mark of intellectualism really applying to any of those.

Reaper was funny and the Devil really carried it, but it did kinda go in circles in fairly short order. Easily forgivable though, since it was funny and going around in circles isn't such a horrible thing when a series doesn't take itself seriously.

Terminator was somewhat interesting, but spread what they had too thin. It's the mark of many shows of that ilk, trying to pull off long story arcs can get tiresome when the material could be handled more succinctly without real loss. Suddenly in the last episode they hinted at maybe having some interesting place to go, but guess we won't know now.

Better Off Ted made me smirk a little, but never had me over the top entertained or anything.

I was a big fan of the first season of Heroes. There were some genuinely interesting mysteries and satisfying reveals. They really had no where to go from there but down. They really wore out the Sylar character, and never created a villain as compelling as him again. Similarly they had to nerf the most powerful good guy, and propped up Hiro moreso than I think was originally intended.

Can't comment on the other two. I will say Firefly could've gone places, but give Whedon too much leeway and he will produce an overly dragged out set of arcs.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

My personal peeve is using boat physics in space. There's a natural "up" direction, ships bank when they turn, and ships top out at a maximum speed.

Topping out at a maximum speed is understandable. Given the incidence of particles and debris in space, going faster means that you get exposed to more radiation and a higher chance of collisions with stuff. If there's space and energy limitations then there's a practical speed limit on spaceships. Go any faster and then you end up damaging your ship or dying due to radiation exposure. Don't forget that your acceleration imposes limitations on your speed. Going so fast that you take days to slow down or to change your direction doesn't work so well if you are engaged in close combat. Also, c provides a upper speed limit in normal space as we understand it.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'll give free passes on FTL and generated gravity, as those are virtually prerequisites for the type of setting involved."

Your post is very insightful and shows the work of someone in engineering or the sciences... May I just point out that the sentence I quoted also applies to us? Our physical reality precludes any form of Space Nuttery, including Moon colonies, Mars colonies and the wackier Galaxy-colonizing. It also nixes space-based power generation and space mining. I just want to point that out.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[khallow]

Besides there's the definitive argument for living ships. How can you have space whales, if you don't have living ships? Space harpooning inert space debris just doesn't work for me. And space environmentalists need something to angst (or is that "space angst") about other than oppressed giant blue smurfs on planets.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Culture20]

Regarding firefly and serenity: I didn't see all of the firefly episodes on tv because of the unannounced schedule changes. I didn't see serenity in theaters because it was in the theaters in my (medium sized) city for only one week. I didn't get a chance to see it because of a mix of time constraints and theater stupidity. Even the dollar theaters didn't play it afterward. So I bought serenity on DVD just like I bought firefly. But if they would have been "straight to DVD" productions, I probably would have not bought either.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[ScrewMaster]

The series ran until the story ended, then it ended. May god grant that happens more often.

The series (like all other Sci-Fi Channel series before it) ended when Bonnie Hammer, or her successor, decided to kill it and not a minute before. Usually it was to put on more wrestling, or some mindless show like "First Wave".

Sci-fi Channel my ass. Pardon me, "SyFy Channel", whatever the FUCK that means. I used to love that channel, back when shows like Sliders and Stargate SG-1 were on. They also tended to show decent movies. They were, in fact, sufficient reason for me to pay my cable bill each month. But that hasn't been true for a long, long time. I wrote a couple of letters to Bonnie Hammer some years ago, didn't even get a form letter in response. They haven't been in touch with their viewership for quite some time.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[visualight]

Farscape and Firefly

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[forlornhope]

I think the one thing that BSG got right about living ships was the fact that the living goo inside actually served a purpose. Near the end, when Galactica was about done for, they started spreading that goo around and it would grow and harden in ways that improved the structure of the ship. So it isn't like it was useless goo just there for looks. It was the self repair system, which makes a lot of sense in how it operated. The fact that it was red like blood was simply a design decision (or maybe because it was rich in iron oxide?).

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[cloricus]

3. Space combat. This one is kinda a case of rule of cool. Realistic space combat wouldn't look like much. But really, the ranges involved in BSG are much too short, both for weapons fire and for targeting/detection.

I totally agreed with the ranges used in BSG space combat. Too many hours of EVE fleet fights have convinced me that regardless of what makes sense space combatants will always follow a simple rule regarding engagement ranges: furtherest 'safe' distance to effective deploy weapons. In BSGs context this meant incredibly close range battles due to the option of deploying nukes which needed as short a travel distance as possible since both forces had defense batteries. These close ranges were backed up with the ability to jump away, assuming the FTL stayed up (real life wouldn't have plot devices). In EVE the same sort of tactic exists, typical maximum range of battleships is 150KM and at that range it takes almost a minute to take direct action against a fleet giving it time to jump away. I assume this rule would be a constant in any combat where both parties have the option of fleeing at will.

The way space combat would look is entirely dependent on what sort of ships exist. A couple of shuttles duking it out would really be who landed the first shot. My only issue here is light source, how would you see the battle with no light. BSG battles often mimicked what you'd see in EVE where the larger ships really just sat there while the smaller ships had all the fun and the real action, if any, was in following them. BSG battles always heavily focused on the fighters.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[forlornhope]

Not entirely. It means that doing BSG without an FTL would have been really really boring (running from a superior force in space without the ability to 'jump' doesn't last very long). And making BSG without generated gravity would be very expensive with everyone having to be on wires every time they moved around. Also, the exercise program to keep all those people from losing all their muscle mass would have taken up the entire show.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[roc97007]

Not sure I agree on Universe. The last couple of episodes make me suspect the writers have lost their way. Look we don't really need the girl having an alien hiding inside. There are lots of other loose plot threads on which they could move forward without having to add yet another that they'll abandon anyway in a few more episodes.

And let's face it, it's not reasonable for Rush to be able to keep the control room secret for this long. The others have *seen* the control room in the gate ship. They *know* what a control room looks like and probably the most likely location. It's contrived and totally out of character for Young to not have Rush followed either physically or electronically at all times at this point.

SGU is becoming uninteresting because they're taking small plot points and obsessing over them in episode after episode after episode. I'm still watching for now, but if something doesn't happen in another couple of episodes, I'll drop it, just as I dropped Caprica. Which, incidentally, had all the good parts in the pilot and then was excruciatingly boring afterwards.

This is not about a show being intelligent. It's about a show having too much dead time and too many contrived conflicts designed to fill same. It's about writers who (a) don't have a story arc and are just wandering, or (b) have a story arc, but are trying to stretch one season of story to three seasons to guarantee income from reruns.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Rakishi]

It also won't bleed if you shoot it,

Sure it might, likely has all sorts of fluids in it. Cooling, material transfer, hydraulics and so on. Just because it's a "living ship" does not mean it's made from the same material as life on Earth.

nor does it have a spongy mass of brain tissue at the controls.

That's a design decision, if the easiest way to make an AI is to grow one from brain tissue than why not just make that part of the ship?

It's like the writers somehow got the idea in their heads that flesh can be engineered to extreme levels of durability and regeneration, or without the limitations of conservation of matter and energy.

No, they simply don't have your limited imagination and understand that just because life on earth is made out of something that doesn't mean all life must be made of that. Plenty of great hard science fiction covering that area I should add.

It ties into a fundamental misunderstanding about the capabilities and limitations of evolution and life in general.

Life has no limitations, anything that grows and reproduces is alive. It can be made of nuetronium and eat stars. Or be made of metal and nano-machines (technically proteins are nano-machines anyway). Or maybe it breather methane. Living ships in general are described as being engineered rather than naturally evolving so I'm not sure why you even mentioned that.

Want to see a ship made or organic matter? Wooden sailboat. You'll note we make our warships out of steel, and would continue to do so even if we could make a wooden boat that healed.

Why are you imposing the arbitrary restriction of it having to be made of Earth style organic material? Life is not limited to being carbon based. Hell, even life on Earth isn't as stupid as you apparently think it is. That calcium which makes up your bones isn't particularly organic.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Ihmhi]

This comic illustrates the subject well, I believe. I rarely see a series that goes for more than 3 or 4 seasons and is very good.

There's nothing wrong with the short form! If you write out a series to be 3 seasons, you shouldn't hurriedly try to make a fourth because the producers wanted to drop a ton of money in your pocket. Finish the three seasons and leave it at that. Hey, you could always follow up with a movie!

On the flip side, I think maybe I would rather see a good series go long and have a lot of mediocre episodes than a series go short and not be able to resolve any of its major plotlines.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[RsG]

I'll let slide the question of how exactly said goop was effecting the repairs.

What was in my head when I was talking bio-ships in BSG was actually more the stuff like the meat brain found inside the Cylon Raiders. That made zero sense, except insofar as it was needed for a contrived Deus Ex Machina.

Seriously, they don't even have the excuse of not possessing computers perfectly able to do the same job. The Centurions demonstrated that. Nor was this a question of having biological systems for a biological pilot, as the Raiders were essentially unmanned ships. They had no excuse.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[GiveBenADollar]

3. Space combat. This one is kinda a case of rule of cool. Realistic space combat wouldn't look like much. But really, the ranges involved in BSG are much too short, both for weapons fire and for targeting/detection.

4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support).

I have to give BSG a lot of credit for space combat because they did allow ships to turn 180 while still traveling in the same direction. Most space combat I've seen treats the ships like aircraft instead of rockets, so I was very pleasantly surprised. Also the ranges used are done so for dramatic reasons vice realism. Top Gun for example has aircraft almost touching each other in combat scenes, but if they showed actual ranges then all you would be able to make out on your TV would be a speck. I don't fault the movies for this because they want to emphasize what the pilot sees, not what it actually looks like.

As for living ships, I know it's been overdone, but I like the idea. We are always finding creatures in unexpected places on our planet and there is no biological limit to living in space other than the need for food and oxygen or whatever the organism lives off of. Sure it's beyond our level of technology, but it's not impossible and it could potentially have benefits such as repairing its own injuries. Why are you so set against the idea?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[LetterRip]

If you want to complain about bad television being the norm, you need to go find people and convince them to watch your favorite show instead of { watching crap like American Idol, pirating the show off the Internet, doing intellectually-stimulating or otherwise rewarding activities besides TV }. Lousy television is their fault, not the networks', the latter is just giving people what they want.

Only those that are used for ratings sampling determine what shows are shown - Nielsen ratings primarily. So those watching it off the internet, or other such activities have almost zero impact on what is or isn't shown unless they are one of about 25,000 Nielsen families ie about a 1 in 4000 chance.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Korin43]

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles seemed to run out of ideas halfway through the first season. Another season would've just prolonged its death. I bet they only did the last season they way they did because they knew they wouldn't have to figure out the next episode.

Stargate Universe was a bad idea from the beginning, but I admit it's getting better. I hope whoever thought we needed a series of Stargate: Relationship Drama and No Action got fired. Not to mention that the plot of almost every episode in the first season was "We're going to die, let's cry and/or have sex! ... Yay! The ship saved us.. again!" With the introduction of aliens and a way of controlling the ship, it looks like it has a chance. I hope they didn't blow it with the first season.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly the problem with caprica was it just wasn't really very good.
It wasn't compelling at all either.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Rakishi]

It makes sense within context. In retrospect I assume since that show didn't seem to have that much planning. The centurions were outdated designs and didn't seem too capable (possibly to prevent another rebellion). The Raiders were thus designed around the newer and more capable humanoid cyclons. That meant a human type brain inside them. They're not unmanned ships or organic ships but simply ships with a specially designed hard-wired pilot. That meant that they could, for example, resurrect and as such improve in combat despite being destroyed in battle.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[CyprusBlue113]

Even then, most of us aren't counted due to the incredibly idiotic DVR policies.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

I was disappointed to see "Defying Gravity" get flushed. They were set up for, like, six more planets (seasons?), but the connection was terminated...
Guess we'll have to wait for a fan-based CGI continuation of the series.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[nedlohs]

Heroes went downhill pretty fast after season 1 (though season 1 was so good that it would have been really hard not to). I watched every episode and would watch more, but it ran its course and the writers seemed to run out of ideas.

Caprica never really grabbed me, though I watched it hoping it would get interesting.

Stargate Universe also never grabbed me, though I never watched any of the other Stargate shows so that's probably just my taste...

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[WCLPeter]

Actually Battlestar: The Remake stopped being good around the middle of Season Two, right around the time they found "New Caprica". After that it got ploddingly slow, even more so than it already had been, and simply became infuriating to watch; I fell asleep numerous times due to boredom and found myself constantly having to rewind to watch what I'd missed. It was only because I'd already invested two years of my life into the show, and my fervent hope they would somehow manage to go back to the exceptional quality of the mini-series and first season, that even got me to watch the final two seasons.

I shouldn't have bothered. Seeing Ron Moore turn the once scary genocidal killing machines with a plan into inept whiny melodramatic losers who couldn't plan themselves out of a paper bag, they were too busy standing around talking about their feelings for hours on end with not only themselves but also the people they wanted to kill, made it really hard to enjoy the show. It also became apparent, very quickly, that Ron Moore had no idea what the hell to do with the show after a while. Incomprehensible story lines, the large portions of cannon that were completely retconned, the bordering on incredibly stupid waits between episodes, the almost Soap Operaesque story lines all made for a show that only got worse as time went on but, like a train wreck in slow motion, really really slow motion, it was just too hard to turn away. And don't even get me started on the completely pointless 3 hour "Lord of the Rings" ending that really only had about 35-40 minutes worth of value in it.

The show was so bad it soured me on all things Battlestar: The Remake that I couldn't even stomach the idea of watching Battlestar: The Prequel (Craprica). Of course if they wait a few years and give Richard Hatch the go ahead to produce his Battlestar: The Second Coming series to continue the story of the original, I'd be all over that in a heartbeat.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Joe Tie.]

Well said. It's why I really prefer shows like being human. You only get a handful of episodes, with no filler. No shitty boxing match episodes, just pure plot development from start to finish. When a show goes quantity over quality, it winds up washing out the chunks of quality in the attempt.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[RsG]

Sure it might, likely has all sorts of fluids in it. Cooling, material transfer, hydraulics and so on. Just because it's a "living ship" does not mean it's made from the same material as life on Earth.

You're reaching. Recall we're talking about BSG here (and the other series that had this cliche).

The Cylon Raider brain bled actual blood. Not coolant, hydraulic fluid or any such material.

That's a design decision, if the easiest way to make an AI is to grow one from brain tissue than why not just make that part of the ship?

A brain the size of a large dog? That can be outflown by a human pilot? In a setting where they have truly mechanical AI (in the form of Cylon Centurions)? Right, that's clearly a more efficient design.

No, they simply don't have your limited imagination and understand that just because life on earth is made out of something that doesn't mean all life must be made of that. Plenty of great hard science fiction covering that area I should add... ...Why are you imposing the arbitrary restriction of it having to be made of Earth style organic material?

Because, in series like BSG/B5/Farscape/etc, the carbon based, amino acid derived nature of the living ships is canon, meaning this isn't a question of me imposing my own "limited imagination". This is a case of the writers failing to do the research. And copying each others ideas without checking whether the copied idea made any sense in the first place.

Now, I will grant you, life could evolve to fit niches completely unlike our own. But that isn't what's being discussed here, and you're veering off course by bringing it up.

Show me a series which has biological/organic spacecraft (including series where the craft are cybernetic), and where the biological components are expressly derived from some living tissue that has no common elements with our own, and we'll talk. Don't speak of hypothetical examples, show an actual one.

Note that by "no common elements" I mean none. No viruses from the crew infecting the ship (BSG, Voyager). No common nutrients, like where the ship can "eat" human food (Lexx, Farscape, SW EU). Completely alien chemistry - show me a series with a ship like that.

Life has no limitations

I'm going to take this one quote as a sterling example of what's wrong with your argument.

Life has limitations. Organic life based around carbon chemistry using water as a solvent is inherently limited in what ranges of temperature, pressure and ionizing radiation it can operate. There is earth life that can survive exposure to space (water bears are an example), but only through mechanisms that allow such life to shut down and restart at a later time. This is not my opinion, it is an established chemical and biological fact. Put another way, ask someone with knowledge of biology greater than or equal to my own (a biology professor for instance), and they will back me up on this point.

Want to get around those limitations by using different chemistries? Okay. What are you using in lieu of carbon as a primary building block? What solvent are you using? What system of energy transfer serves for metabolic function? All forms of life will have limits, even if those limits differ from our own. Simply saying that the living tissue in question is not carbon based does not excuse it behaving in impossible ways.

Any life would face the same limitations imposed by the laws of physics. Many bio-ships in fiction are thermodynamically impossible. The writers try to get around issues with mechanical ships (reaction mass and repair) by using tissue in lieu of machinery, ignoring that the problems are not mechanical in nature, but are instead the laws of physics.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[phek]

The first season of stargate universe was horrible, i had started calling the the show "stuck" because every episode was just about being stuck somewhere (the ship, a room, some planet). Luckily this season seems to have picked up a bit but i wouldn't at all of been disappointed if they cancelled it after the first season.

S:U suffers from the same thing caprica and many other shows suffer from lately (including this season of sons of anarchy). Nothing happens in most episodes, you only get like 2 or 3 episodes a season of anything important happening to advance the story. Stargate SG1 seemed to have a good setup (similar to x-files). 75% of the episodes consisted of an interesting story within itself which left you with the feeling that they could use something that was told in that episode later in the season/show arc. The other 25% were usually just entertaining filler episodes to show something cool happen that doesn't happen in peoples lives.

Come to think of it, these horrible seasons of shows all seemed to start when the writers strike ended. Did something happen from that resolution to get networks to ask for shows like that or are the writers doing this on purpose for job security/revenge?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[gumbi west]

Um... yeah, but cheers and TNG sucked for two seasons and then took off when the writers figured out who was good and the actors found the characters. These days, you don't get two years to do that. You get canceled right away. I think cheers was a commercial success...

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

nice rant, but what you miss is intelligent people are too busy reading to watch a crappy show. Even the smartest show on tv is pretty dumb.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[twidarkling]

Exactly. It was mentioned that the Raiders had about dog level intelligence (or higher, by the end), and were continually resurrected to learn from the mistakes that got them killed in the last fight, so they continually became deadlier fighters.

It also makes more sense to do it that way since then the fighters were able to react to situations on solo missions, rather than needing to be connected to a C&C ship, or only be able to deal with minor parameters.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia claims that it didn't quite break even at the box office, but did break even on dvd sales. They give the 25.5 million figure on that page you quoted as the domestic gross.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_(film)

If you include international gross, you are up to 38.8 of the 39 million production cost. Arguable it would have broken even at the box office alone had United International Pictures not cancelled theatrical release in at least seven countries in favour of direct to dvd.

Without exact dvd numbers, it is hard to say exactly, but here is a link

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?threadid=59843

that estimates total income would be around 60 million as of 2006, compared to total expenses at around 50 million (10 million more than production for advertising and such). That's a 20% return. Possibly not enough for a sequel, but still not that bad.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[RsG]

I have to give BSG a lot of credit for space combat because they did allow ships to turn 180 while still traveling in the same direction. Most space combat I've seen treats the ships like aircraft instead of rockets, so I was very pleasantly surprised.

Totally agreed on that point. And the Newtonian flight mechanics were probably the most realistic element of space combat in the re-imaged series.

And yeah, realism in this case would mean a lot of BVR combat, with the added element of total silence in space, and that's not going to create the kind of wow-factor and dramatic tension people expect. That's what I was getting at with the "rule of cool" description.

Why are you so set against (living ships)?

Well, it's partly as you said, they've been done to death. But they weren't a good idea the first time I saw them either.

If a setting had "living ships" that had AIs running on a computer network, with Von Neumann machines the size of specks handling repairs (this could be nano-tech, but doesn't have to be nano-scale to work), and a personality that interacted with the crew, I would be happy. That's hard science. Each concept is realistic, attainable and futuristic. Provided certain elements of realism were respected, like finite resources and realistic time-frames for repairs, I'd have no problem with it, and calling this ship "alive" would not seem unreasonable.

This isn't what modern soft science fiction has.

What soft sci-fi has are ships made of meat. Carbon based, amino acid/protein, water-as-a-solvent, meat. This often gets rooted in canon, either explicitly, through the writers saying that's what the ship is made of, or implicitly, by showing a lack of biochemical barriers (the classic "virus plot" where the ship gets sick with something that infects humans for instance).

Inevitably, the meat-ship is shown being stronger/more advanced than its metal counterparts, and often repairs without expending biomass or energy, at a rate that makes bacterial growth look sluggish.

This. Is. Bad. Biology. Ask any bio major, or prof, or even an interested amateur. This is very much rooted in the same bad science that gave us the version of evolution seen on Star Trek, which bears no resemblance at all to actual scientific evolution. It's like the moment a ship being biological is established, science goes flying out the window.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[CAIMLAS]

I'm not sure what you're on about... good stories end. BSG was a good story.

The reason crap like American Idol and 90210 keep going on (jesus, when did they bring back 90210) is because they're crap: they're not good stories. They have no beginning, middle, and end. Their character development is weak, and therefore all characters are easily replaceable. They just keep going on and on, like yet another load of dirty laundry.

BSG lasted for 6 full seasons, and each of them were fresh and unique, without compromising the story. Each episode was a full 40 minutes long. That's a full 80-plus hours of quality entertainment. That's a long damn time for any TV show, never mind something which isn't:

* a talk show (this includes sports and cooking shows, and anything similar )
* a reality TV show
* a sitcom
* a soap opera
* news
* a children's show

Look at this list: list of longest running US TV series

If you remove talking head shows, soap operas, and news, you're left with a scant few at the bottom, lower numbers. Most of those are sitcoms. Of the ones which are not:

* CSI
* JAG
* MST3K (hardly common fare)
* Stargate SG-1 (yeah, that's not good TV. It's only one of the most wildly popular geek shows, and generally decent shows, ever)
* TMNT (cartoon)
* ER

At 15 seasons, you're in the "classic television everyone has seen and memorized the characters in because it's part of our cultural identity" department - stuff like The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. At 20 hours, you've got Lassie, Gunsmoke, and Law & Order.

A full 6 seasons for a serial drama (or any serial, for that matter) is a hell of a lot. The only two I can think of which have gotten 5 or more seasons are Burn Notice and 24 (and with 24, you could start each season 'fresh', while the last several seasons sucked).

So if there'd been another 1, 2 seasons of BSG, what then? What more was there to explain after season 5? Not a lot: they basically just had to wrap up the loose subplots and finish up with some character development. We knew who all but the final 5 were (and they gave plenty of hints). Truth be told, to even keep up with things you had to be quite invested in BSG - it was very easy to lose your way. Yet it still managed to keep a very large, very dedicated following, all considering.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Hamsterdan]

One of the reasons I've always liked B5... Starfuries use newtonian physics in combat.

Kinda cool that NASA asked JMS permission to use that design (was granted as long as they keep the Starfury name)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfury#Real_world_interest

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[CAIMLAS]

Too many people are still overwrought about cancellations of great shows, like Firefly. The thing is, if they kept riding that horse, it'd just have ended up becoming another Star Trek Voyager.

Interestingly, the better seasons in Voyager were the later ones (IIRC). People didn't like them because they 'broke convention', which IMO, means it's a good story. :)

As for Firefly, there was at least another full season of content there. Supposedly, there were 2 full seasons of plot and character advancement already developed. They had to rush it and cram it into the movie to give it some sort of 'closure', but at the same time, it fell short.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

What surprises me is that some group producing a new show just doesn't simply make a deal with Google and make their weekly one-hour show episodes into four 15min blocks and upload them to YouTube. If the show is good and viewership is there, it's perfectly possible to make money doing that since they have a monetize function in place that uses the same kind of advertising the networks used.

To be honest, once you get past most local news, TV networks aren't really needed anymore. Broadband internet has come of age.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[substance2003]

The thing that you are missing is that a show needs time to find it's audience out there.
Networks used to stand by their shows for 2 years before the audience built up enough to be seen as hit tv.

This notion of only looking only at the bottom line and canceling a show after only a few episodes started in the 90s.
This is when quality really started to go down and why it gave rise to such drivel as American Idol that demands no really use of viewer's thoughts.
I can cite comedy shows such as Cheers or Night Court which in both cases started with terrible ratings.
It took 2 years before they had good ratings and eventually be among NBC's highest rated shows.
They would not have made it in today's standard of doing business in TV land.
I know it's not sci-fi but the new report I had seen about this issue back then wasn't focusing on Science-Fiction at all either at the time so the problem is occurring even for other genres.

So the question becomes, Why are they so unwilling to give time now when it worked in the past?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

> Networks are businesses: they exist to make money. Network executives are not evil men who... well, OK, they are evil, but not in the way you think: they don't say to themselves, "This show is much too intelligent, it might awaken our viewers out of their drunken stupor, cause them to realize that corporations like us are the reason for their miserable lives, and spark a revolution! Away with it!". No, what they do is say, "This show is losing money, not enough people are watching it. Away with it." That's their job.

TV Networks are subject to the exact flaws that plague other businesses. Short term thinking in terms of immediate payoff is one problem. Another is managerial churn, paired with a fiefdom mentality. Some new execs come in and they MUST CHANGE THINGS, because they have to put their mark on the business - half to 'own' it, half to prove that its successes are specifically due to them and not their predecessor. In TV, this manifests as timeslots being shifted, creative teams getting jerked around, and new people trying to poison the works of the predecessors (giving all the good attention to the new shows they're bringing in). There has been a lot of speculation along those lines over the past decade, since a lot of really promising shows got killed off.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[CAIMLAS]

Yet, we can't grow compounds as strong as steel - yet. Not on that scale, at least.

Consider: bone is actually stronger, by weight, than mild steel. It also has significantly better compaction properties (like cement). What if we could grow bone structures, held together with ligaments, muscles, and sinew?

If we figured out how to keep this tissue alive, we'd have a lightweight, flexible, yet resilient vessel. In many ways, it would be superior in construction to an aircraft carrier - at least for the purposes of space flight. If you can grow organic tissue and keep it alive (that's a big "if", but it seems on the horizon today), repairs would be seemingly easy.

For space flight, organic, grown ships seem to make more sense. It's self-repairing at the fabric level, the materials are mostly lightweight, and there are many examples and specimens in the animal world on which to base your genetic engineering which are likely well-suited.

As for a wooden sailboat? I'd much rather have a sailboat made from living matter than one made from synthetics or metal. Metal rusts (moisture on a ship?) and becomes embrittled; plastics become embrittled as well. I suspect we'd make our war ships from wood, if we were able to do so: there aren't a lot of trees large enough to serve as deck beams on an aircraft carrier.

Meanwhile, we've got single organism aspen groves which are tens of thousands of years old. They're specially grown for this environment, based on thousands of years of development. They're resilient and have natural adaptations to thrive after common disasters (eg. forest fire).

In my mind, it's more conceivable that ships might be made with evolutionarily-pushed organics than nanobot repair and the Borg.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[laron]

Re: international gross, maybe it would have helped to show "Serenity" in the cinemas after "Firefly" had been aired on a local TV network. Releasing it to an unprepared audience was just stupid.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[quacking duck]

The series ran until the story ended, then it ended. May god grant that happens more often.

Amen, brother!

Too many people are still overwrought about cancellations of great shows, like Firefly. The thing is, if they kept riding that horse, it'd just have ended up becoming another Star Trek Voyager.

Maybe, maybe not. All I know is, halfway through the first and only season of Firefly, I felt I knew far more about all its characters, than I did Voyager's characters through its entire 7 year run.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[unitron]

Heroes... why did they cancel that?

Because that annoying guy from "Prison Break" made it a lot less enjoyable to watch?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Belial6]

Funny, I thought it stopped being good just about the time they introduced a female Starbuck who in the first scene smokes cigars, plays poker, drinks hard liqueur, and punches out a man twice her size so that they could attempt to establish that she could fill the original Starbucks shoes.

Honestly, I could have taken the show way more seriously if they had not called it Battlestar Galactica. By calling it that, they set a high bar too meet, and unfortunately, they ended up being way too cheeseball to come even close. I suffered through the first season hoping something would come of it, and every episode got cheesier and more contrived.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Rakishi]

You're reaching. Recall we're talking about BSG here (and the other series that had this cliche).
The Cylon Raider brain bled actual blood. Not coolant, hydraulic fluid or any such material.

Because it's a human derived body shoved into a regular ship.

A brain the size of a large dog? That can be outflown by a human pilot? In a setting where they have truly mechanical AI (in the form of Cylon Centurions)? Right, that's clearly a more efficient design.

The Centurions are shown as limited in many ways and were not trusted by the humanoid Cylons. The biological Raiders were shown to be able to regenerate (thus learn perpetually) and some could out fly humans.

Because, in series like BSG/B5/Farscape/etc, the carbon based, amino acid derived nature of the living ships is canon, meaning this isn't a question of me imposing my own "limited imagination". This is a case of the writers failing to do the research. And copying each others ideas without checking whether the copied idea made any sense in the first place.

Okay, where do they say the ships in B5 and Farscape are carbon based? In BSG the ships are perfectly mechanical aside from the pilot. In Farscape and B5 the ships are made of horribly alien materials and it's generally noted many times how absurdly alien their biology is.

Life has limitations. Organic life based around carbon chemistry using water as a solvent is inherently limited in what ranges of temperature, pressure and ionizing radiation it can operate. There is earth life that can survive exposure to space (water bears are an example), but only through mechanisms that allow such life to shut down and restart at a later time. This is not my opinion, it is an established chemical and biological fact. Put another way, ask someone with knowledge of biology greater than or equal to my own (a biology professor for instance), and they will back me up on this point.

Amazingly making a shell around oneself to provide the required environment is not some magical ability restricted only to devices made by humans. You know, like the hull every spaceship. In fact if you plugged the holes (without killing them) and toughened the skin a bit you could shove a human out into the vacuum of space for quite a while. Quite trivial to make a spaceship with a carbon biology and existing laws of physics although it wouldn't be of much use, more like a tree in space I suppose.

Want to get around those limitations by using different chemistries? Okay. What are you using in lieu of carbon as a primary building block? What solvent are you using? What system of energy transfer serves for metabolic function? All forms of life will have limits, even if those limits differ from our own. Simply saying that the living tissue in question is not carbon based does not excuse it behaving in impossible ways.

You are once again limiting your definition of life to things which are like life on Earth. A 100% mechanical spaceship with an AI and a repair facility that can make copies of itself is alive. Electricity transfer energy and metal is the building block.

Any life would face the same limitations imposed by the laws of physics. Many bio-ships in fiction are thermodynamically impossible. The writers try to get around issues with mechanical ships (reaction mass and repair) by using tissue in lieu of machinery, ignoring that the problems are not mechanical in nature, but are instead the laws of physics.

We're talking about fucking science fiction series, every bloody ship breaks fifty laws of physics by just existing. Do you comprehend how large the heat sinks would need to be for even the most trivial of spaceships to not melt into slag inside of a single episode? The laws of physics the show operates under are explicitly different from our own or they have found ways to break them.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Johnno74]

At least you've got it better than australian TV.

Typically the networks here hype the shit out of upcoming shows or new seasons, highlighting the fact that it is "fast-tracked" from the US. 1/3rd of the way through the season they will without warning suddenly either miss a few weeks, or show a few re-runs of old episodes in random order, without advertising that it is a re-run. Sometimes a few new epoisodes will be shown, but the ratings probably aren't what the network hoped (because they have successfully driven away a decent proportion of their viewers)

They they will move the show to another timeslot, 11:30 on a weeknight or something. Possibly they will randomly change the timeslot each week week for a few weeks after this.

Another few weeks of this and the show will disappear without a trace, never to be mentioned again.

They have done this with supernatural, V, house, NCIS.

A lot of people here now just download torrents of shows if they like the torrent. Of course, the networks now winge that "internet is destroying us".

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Fluffeh]

My personal peeve is using boat physics in space. There's a natural "up" direction, ships bank when they turn, and ships top out at a maximum speed.

Actually, there is good reason for those things.
Ships Banking rather than just turning: Okay, sure, in space there is technically no need to bank. You can just turn BUT from a pilots point of view, you don't want the pilot getting jerked around left and right in high G environments. Look at F1 racing car drivers. They are packed SOOOO tightly into their seats, especially the part behind their crash helmet, that they generally can move their head only a few degrees left and right. If the ship banks like a boat, the pilot will always be pushed "down" into his/her seat.

Now, add to that thruster control. Rather than having four or more systems that can all equally efficiently turn a ship without banking it, wouldn't it be much better to have a small set to control yaw and a main set to control pitch? That would make for a much simpler system.

Ships maximum speed: Totally agree with you on this one. Except that most people who don't understand physics wouldn't understand that statement if you replaced "speed" with "acceleration". It is the same meaning, but more people understand it.

"I can't go any faster!! The other ship is getting away!"
"I am accelerating as fast as I can! The other ship has more thrust and is getting away!"

Same thing, max speed, max acceleration. Deal with it. More people understand it that way without any physics knowledge.

Natural Up Direction: Okay, so in space, you don't really really truly need a natural up direction, but if you have a bunch of ships all going in the same direction, you certainly would want them all aligned to be the same way. I mean, just imagine trying to communicate if no-one cared what way they were rotated!

"Fleet! Look out on your left!" turns into:
"Jack, look out below! Paul, it's to your right! Mick, it's right in your front window sights, Tom, it's behind you!"

See why all the ships would be in a natural "up" direction? Simple communication. It's a formation for a reason.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[sheddd]

I agree with most of your post... but I think Serenity made money; Hollywood Accounting is probably the reason. How could you possibly actually spend over 30 million making the film? I liked it but I seriously doubt it really cost that much. Interesting listen on Planet Money #177 about the accounting done in Gone in 60 Seconds.

Summary: Hollywood studios typically set up a corporation for every movie; that corporation's job it to pay the studio insane fees so the entities which are paid based upon profit aren't paid much.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Grishnakh]

You're forgetting the most important sci-fi show in recent history: Firefly.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Grishnakh]

Yep, they need to keep these shows' runs a little shorter, to make sure they don't have a lot of filler in there. BSG really could have been a season shorter. But it least it's nothing like Lost, which has gone on for far too long, and should have wrapped up in about 5 seasons.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[witherstaff]

It ran one or two episodes too long. The writers ran out of mojo and left Starbuck hanging - oh, she was an angel right. I kept waiting for them to establish a small colony named atlantis. Instead everyone went totally hippie and decided to give up everything and breed with early hominids. There's a host of problem from going space faring tech to not just low tech but no tech. I wonder how many lasted one year without getting scurvy or other common ailments. I guess I was foolish to take 'everything will be revealed' at face value.

I would have been happier if they pulled a Sopranos and finished the series with Starbuck entering the musical jump co-ordinates, yelling 'jump' and having BSG winking out.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

SGU SPOILER ALERT

• Season 2 Episode 7 (Nov 9)
  Rush and Young investigate an abandoned alien craft which is just outside the Destiny. While they do this, the crew on board the ship find the bridge and discover that Rush is responsible for the countdown clock not activating when the ship emerges from FTL.

Normally I hate reading spoilers but at this point I realize I simply don't care enough about SGU or its characters to mind.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[metrix007]

Woah woah woah.

Reaper was terrible. Terminator was full of shitty acting and poor storytelling, and after they added Shirley Manson things just went horribly downhill. A t-1001? Really? That's something I would expect from a shitty merchandise backstory.

Better of Ted still had a lot of hilarious episodes in season 2. The problem was that both seasons were not mainstream *enough*. Shows with an obscure sense of humour are going to have an obscure amount of fans.

Heroes was shit after S1. S2 had promise, and given that it was the WGA strike can be excused. Season 3 was complete crap and the characters were no longer themselves, and then S4 was completely irrelevant to the previous seasons.

SG:U is shit. It is so formulaic and trying to be different while leaving behind all the reasons the other two series succeeded.

Say what you like, but even smart people don't watch bad shows. You just seem like a pretentious ass with what you wrote above.

As for good shows? Chuck is an extremely well crafted show, with a great many intelligent jokes and *amazing character development. It is without a doubt the best show in the last few years, and I hope more people discover it. Mad Men and Breaking bad are amazing, as is True Blood. For non cable shows check out Fringe, Community, 30 rock and Supernatural.

Bad shows get cancelled because they are *bad*, and yes a lot of good shows get caught in the crossfire. Most of the shows you listed above got cancelled because they were bad, with the exception being Better of Ted. To say there are not any smart shows on TV at the moment however....is just flat out wrong.

Try broadening your horizons.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[MaskedSlacker]

It's like the writers somehow got the idea in their heads that flesh can be engineered to extreme levels of durability and regeneration, or without the limitations of conservation of matter and energy. It ties into a fundamental misunderstanding about the capabilities and limitations of evolution and life in general.

No more than non-biotic craft rely on misunderstandings of conservation of matter and energy (and relativity).

Semi-biotic craft seem to have several obvious advantages to me. We've already experimented with using excised brain tissue wired and train to control a flight simulator: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a-dish-fly-fighter-plane.html

The advantages to this seem obvious. The idea of using biotic components is less ridiculous than the idea of faster-than-light travel (which requires a violation of everything we know about physics, as opposed to a highly improbable level of sophistication in genetic engineering).

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[MaskedSlacker]

What was in my head when I was talking bio-ships in BSG was actually more the stuff like the meat brain found inside the Cylon Raiders. That made zero sense, except insofar as it was needed for a contrived Deus Ex Machina.

Why not? We've done it in a lab here (excised brain tissue being trained to control a flight simulator--link in my reply to you above). Having a control computer which with the parallel processing power of neural tissue, as well as the dynamic ability to reprogram itself the way neural tissue can seems pretty advantageous.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment just feels insulting, not insightful. You are praising the money-making machine, and not the artist, or the craft. You're equating "good stuff" solely with "makes money" and saying that simply because we as an audience cannot ourselves expand the niche market, it shouldn't exist. How do these things get rated up?

Anyway, Firefly is also a terrible example - these same network executives also made the decision to air the episodes out of order, stall the airing during sweeps, and show baseball games instead of the show in many areas during the first few weeks. It's *those* decisions that most people backing Firefly are upset about, and not just that they launched the "it's not making enough money" torpedo.

If only some execs would have done the same to Dancing with the Stars and Survivor.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[roc97007]

Agreed. Being Human was interesting precisely because they had a great volume of story in a confined space. The problem was not to fill in the empty spaces, it was to tell the parts of the story they had time to tell. And leave your mind (remember your MIND?? It's the thing that sits in your head between your ears!) leave your MIND to fill in the details.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[roc97007]

Agreed. The girl was cute, but all she did was stand there.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[stunted]

I thought you were going to complain about all the spiritual bollocks in the story lines. Why is it that in fiction, fortune tellers are always correct, where as IRL they're such obvious charlatans.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Patch86]

I think it's a big problem with US shows, over UK ones.

US shows usually have 12-24 episodes to a series, and tend to produce them until viewing figures demand cancellation. UK series are often 6 episodes long, and tend not to be plugged to death.

At that sort of low intensity, a show can stay fresh for a great many years without running out of steam.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

They were off-ship, in a crashed puddle jumper, and didn't know where the gate was supposed to be.

In other words, they didn't have a bone saw.
They didn't have anything long or strong enough to use as a lever, and couldn't reach around to tourniquet his legs.

Once they actually did blow through the debris to get to the gate, dialed it up etc., there was very little time left, so they couldn't actually get help from the ship.

Nice try though. Maybe you should actually try watching the show instead of just glancing at the screen every five minutes or so.

Fucktard.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

You know how Serenity did at the box office, the movie that all the fans were supposed to go see multiple times to convince Fox to bring the show back? It didn't break even, even when you factor in DVD sales. You're not as numerous as you think.

It did break even if you consider the international grosses (and dvd sales). But, of course, breaking even is not the goal of the publishers, whereas making profit IS, so I agree with you on what you are saying here.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Terminator was somewhat interesting, but spread what they had too thin. It's the mark of many shows of that ilk, trying to pull off long story arcs can get tiresome when the material could be handled more succinctly without real loss. Suddenly in the last episode they hinted at maybe having some interesting place to go, but guess we won't know now.

Yeah -- trouble is, when a show is barely getting enough ratings for renewal, it gets renewed with a short order of ~13 episodes, and the showrunner drafts out the season's arc accordingly. Now if it does OK, or enough other shows on the network suck, they'll add an extra 6-10 episodes to the order. This happened to TSCC, and so we got the unmemorable middle of season 2 (dream clinic, dead livestock, etc.).

Now I do blame the networks for this, but it's not like showrunners can't overcome it; it happened to Chuck in season 3, but they took the (AFAICT unorthodox) approach of sticking with the tight 13-ep arc, then following it with a 6-ep mini-season, which worked much better than six random Shaw episodes with no arc advancement. Or they can just replot for a longer season and get the pacing right -- tough, but doable.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[skyride]

AFAIK, a quick browse on wikipedia shows that they discover the control room on E07.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't figure out how SU wasn't just ST:Voyager with a quirky English guy in the lead instead of a quirky woman. The one differentiation was that the ship seemed to have a mind of its own but that wasn't enough to keep me watching more than the first episode, and it sounds like they've even done away with that now (with the control room).

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[delinear]

The big problem I had with Heroes was that the writers seemed to want to replicate season one, bringing together a group of unknowns towards some big finale, but as a viewer I had investment in the original characters. I wanted to see where they were going, but the only way the writers could reconcile the original characters was to neuter them in various ways (Peter loses his powers, Sylar becomes "good", etc). That and the writer's strike bringing an early close (and an early end to pretty much the only new character with any mileage) to the season meaning the first few episodes were slow and dragged out and the last few were rushed and nonsensical really didn't help. I couldn't bring myself to watch season 3 after that, I pretty much expected it to be cancelled in short order so there seemed little point getting back into it even if it was good.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[delinear]

Most shows here in the UK get only six episodes per season to tell their story. Very infrequently it'll be 8 or 12 but mostly just six, which makes for some very tightly scripted story arcs. The good ones always leave you wishing the seasons were longer, but I guess that's preferable to actually having longer seasons that are full of filler episodes that don't go anywhere. Pretty much every US show I've got into in the last decade at least, no matter how much I enjoyed them, fell foul of filler at some points.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[delinear]

While they could have used a little more time to tell the story from the movie, I don't see how they could have filled two whole new seasons. There were enough filler episodes in season one for me to think we could have expected more of the same. If they had a story to tell, why drag it out - tell it in one or two seasons if that's all you've got and tell it really well. If you pull that off, you can always come back later and tell other stories in the same universe, better to keep it short and sweet than to get canned before you've had chance to get your message across. I know for a writer it must seem like a bonus being able to get a show extended over several years (hey, you know you'll be eating for those years), but is there really so little artistic integrity left that writers are always willing to sell out their big story for a few bucks, and so little intelligence that they refuse to see that's a shortcut to cancellation?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

As for the question of the ships being able to consume the same food as the passengers - surely that would be one of the major benefits of this system. If the ship is crippled, the survivors can literally eat the fuel storage to survive until help finds them, alternatively if they're low on fuel due to some catastrophe, they can give up their food to reach their destination. There are lots of benefits to being able to combine food and fuel in one product (not to mention the benefits of it being non-explosive, non-radioactive, etc).

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[teh kurisu]

My problem with SGU was that it started with the premise of this population of people isolated and having to survive on their own, and then instantly killed it with the communication stones bringing them into regular contact with Earth. That, and SGU was meant to be a big break from the previous Stargate series', but that didn't last long either because for the season 1 finale they brought in the Lucian Alliance for a rather disastrous story arc.

Also, why is it suddenly fashionable to split seasons into two? SGU and Caprica both just stopped half way through their first seasons. I watched SGU thinking that it was just slow to get going, but being told that the next episode is six months away, without any sort of season finale type episode to prepare me for it, really killed my interest in the show. Same for Caprica.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[TheRaven64]

In Babylon 5, several of the races - including humans - did not have gravity control. Their larger ships had rotating sections to generate gravity, so you only had weightless conditions in the fighters, and it's not quite so obvious when the pilot is strapped in.

The problem with allowing gravity control is that the same technology required for artificial gravity also gives a reactionless drive. If you can manipulate gravity, then you can trivially build a ship that can accelerate in any direction without any kind of obvious thrust. This gives a huge military advantage, because you can put the engines inside, making them less vulnerable, yet all of the BSG ships used big (exterior-mounted) reaction drives for propulsion.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[TheRaven64]

turn the once scary genocidal killing machines with a plan into inept whiny melodramatic losers who couldn't plan themselves out of a paper bag

The problem with the show is that the premise basically requires this. The Cylons are machines. Unlike humans, they don't need over a decade to go from being created to being effective, they can go into the fight straight off the production line. As they spread out, their production capacity increases. When they left human space before the start of the first episode, they would have spread out and their production capacity would have increased in proportion to the number of star systems they colonised.

In the first episodes, they were shown to have enough Base Stars to completely annihilate the colonial fleet and no reason for them to stop constructing more. We saw how quickly the ships self repaired, and if they can be built at a vaguely similar rate then each shipyard should be able to make at least one a month.

Galactica was slightly more capable than one Base Star. Against two it would struggle, against four it would stand no chance. The Cylons had spies in the fleet, so they knew where it was at all times. They could very easily have jumped in with overwhelming fire power and completely destroyed it at any point.

They didn't, for some reason. For the series to make sense, this reason needs to exist. In both iterations of the show, it's been pretty weak.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[TheRaven64]

This show is losing money, not enough people are watching it. Away with it

Nope. Lost of the shows that are cancelled are making money. That's not the criteria that the networks use. If it were, few people would complain.

The question they actually ask is not whether it's making money, it's whether something else in the same time slot could make more money. If a show is bringing in $1m/week, and another show could bring in $1.5m/week in the same slot, they cancel the first show irrespective of how popular it is. Copyright means that it's often impossible for someone else to resurrect the show.

This is particularly irritating to those of us who aren't in the primary market. I don't see US shows until they are available to rent on DVD in the UK. Quite often, this means that I don't even see the first season of something until after it's been cancelled. International DVD sale and rental income does not factor into their decisions.

They are not killing shows that I like because they are losing money, they are killing shows that I like because airspace in a country where I do not live can be used more profitably in a different way. Convincing more people to watch the shows will not help me, because I often don't see the shows until after they're cancelled, and by then it's too late.

What will help, is convincing the studios not to sign exclusive deals with the networks, and to switch to a business model where they release the pilot, then each subsequent season, under a CC-NC license and don't start producing the next season until they've received enough donations to fund it.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[beowulfcluster]

Spoiler warning, I guess:

Indeed. After the first season and especially in the third season I got a bit tired of the "Ooh Sylar is bad!", "Ooh now Sylar is in a suit and Bennetts partner!", "Ooh now Sylar is bad again!", "Ooh the Petrellis are Sylars parents!", "Ooh no they lied!". Bennett is bad, good, bad, good, bad, good. It was all a bit World Wrestling Federation. Then the powers. Peter has all the powers. Then Peter has no powers. Then Peter can change powers but just one at a time. Hiro has a power, Hiro loses power. Ando has no power, Ando gains power. Mohinder has no power, Mohinder injects something and gains power We need someone to paint the future again but those guys are all dead so let's give that power to Parkman (who still keeps his old power). If they weren't making it up as they went along they sure did a good job of covering that up.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Those weren't reaction drives, those were just the exhausts vents for the Maxwell's demon coolers required to dump the waste heat from the gravdrives... /tongue-in-cheek fanwankery

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Universe is the DS9 to SG1's Next Generation. I like it.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[master_p]

Everything is a business. Networks, software houses, banks, hospitals, schools, industries, power companies...should all these exist ONLY to make money? making money is necessary for sustaining the business, but all these offer necessary services for us as well.

It's funny that you come on in a TV sci-fi show discussion and claim that businesses exist only to make money. Is it a failure of education, or a failure of TV sci-fi shows to pass a message through?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[mfh]

Many don't understand that Sci-fi is big and expensive to make. If the show doesn't break into the kind of audience that Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek, it gets canceled at the earliest opportunity.

Battlestar Galactica was getting tired and old by the time they canceled it. The episodes on New Caprica is when the show really lost its way. The writers became tired and the plot became stale.

I absolutely love science fiction but if people aren't watching, the networks find something that will attract more people.

There is always the problem of human politics in these types of productions as well. Petty differences often get in the way.

In the case of any of these shows the fanbase helps promote through word of mouth, but the shows can't get stale or people lose interest fast.

As an example of a show that is getting better with time is Dexter. You can thank the writers for that, and the cast and the crew. Everyone does their job and everyone GETS IT.

Season Five is the BEST season yet.

You can't say that about sci-fi franchises. More often than not, the second season is the best and it goes downhill from there.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, Batman: Arkham Asylum was not a movie tie-in. If it tied into anyhting, it would've been the graphic novel of the same name (though even that's stretching it).

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Heroes was good for about one season, and then it started to turn into another Lost.

BSG was good for two seasons, and then the writers got drunk on their own success and got a bit carried away with, well, everything.

As to StarGate Universe - look, SG-1 was good until season 9 when the Orii were introduced, and Atlantis was good until about the end of season 3 when Weir "died". The franchise has been thoroughly milked, it's time to put it down and come up with something fresher.

The real question is - why was Firefly cancelled? I also miss Special Unit 2, but that one died due to Imaginary Property reasons. (The fools - a deal could've been cut to make everyone happy, including the viewers)

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone seriously like Craprica? There were moments that were good (like in the recent episode where the cylon bot just murdered a room of people) but there was wayyyy too much junk I didn't care about like Adama's gay brother and his partner whining about their relationship. I don't care about this stuff (especially in sci-fi wtf). I want to see some one get killed/blownup/shot, preferably via robot or the virtual world. Characters drifted back and forth in morals and actions without any explanation, are people supposed to identify with that?

And you know, at the .5 season mark, I was soooo happy when Amanda (Daniel's Wife aka the whiny crying drunk who is supposedly also a scientist but can't do anything beyond act crazy) was killed off, she was clearly the worst and most annoying character ever to grace the screen, and then they brought her back. This is the kind of mistake they kept making.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[cafard]

Natural Up Direction: Okay, so in space, you don't really really truly need a natural up direction, but if you have a bunch of ships all going in the same direction, you certainly would want them all aligned to be the same way. I mean, just imagine trying to communicate if no-one cared what way they were rotated!

"Fleet! Look out on your left!" turns into:

"Jack, look out below! Paul, it's to your right! Mick, it's right in your front window sights, Tom, it's behind you!"

See why all the ships would be in a natural "up" direction? Simple communication. It's a formation for a reason.

For the fleet, of course. But there is no reason why Cylon Basestars would pop out on that same horizontal plane. That's where the natural 'up' feels dodgy to me.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[tgd]

Ooof, I was about to make a snarky comment about it being 2010 not 1993 but realized there IS another 90210.

WTF?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[drinkypoo]

If they weren't making it up as they went along they sure did a good job of covering that up.

Heroes was a TV series made to be like a comic book by fans of comic books. Looked at the world of comic books lately? I believe that at least one major publisher is now on their third universal reset, because they ran out of plots and want to go revisit the old good ones and you can't do that if he's already done it! Heroes thus became a sort of accidental meta-parody of comic books...

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

Reaper was terrible.
No, it had a few weak episodes, but was generally funny and could be clever at times. The guy playing the devil was great.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[drinkypoo]

I don't know about anyone else but I continued to enjoy watching Stargate just about up until this new show. Neither my lady nor I (who have watched ALL the other stargate material together, as well as all of B5, big pieces of Trek, etc) can stand basically any of the characters. The nerd makes me snort occasionally but no lol or rofl. The French guy is a lame. The military guy is dumb. I liked our stereotype-breaking characters in Atlantis much better.

Also, I can't be arsed to watch anything before it hits video any more. Actually I jut got up to 768k so when my ISP is not out of bandwidth (prime time) I can actually watch a halfway decent video stream, so now I'll watch on the web or what have you. But I'm never going to be part of their collected DVR statistics. I suspect there are a lot of us and this is going to cause problems for science fiction programming before it causes problems with other kinds, simply because the people who watch it are more likely to be tech-savvy.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[drinkypoo]

It's like the writers somehow got the idea in their heads that flesh can be engineered to extreme levels of durability and regeneration, or without the limitations of conservation of matter and energy.

I think it most certainly can do the first, but the second is out of the question. Regardless, we're only talking about pressures of 14.7 psi here tops (for humans anyway, and apparently many other species in science-fiction) so it's really not that big a deal. Your skin can almost do it!

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[drinkypoo]

You make some good points but your conclusion is not supported by them. ALL spaceships as they were portrayed in many shows require technologies we don't have (yet?) so complaining about this only as relates to biologicals seems a particular prejudice. This very much includes B5. That life on earth can only survive vacuum by going dormant is entirely irrelevant because life on Earth never encounters vacuum, and thus any ability to survive it is even more accidental than "normal" evolution where the advantage was driven by an actual need and not simply a consequence of some other adaptation. Finally, DNA-based life from other kingdoms regularly eats out of kingdom, for example there are fungi which eat ONLY animals, plants, hydrocarbon compounds like oil and diesel spills... So your objection about Lexx (clearly a bug and therefore probably DNA-based) eating human parts isn't just wrong but actively stupid.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[drinkypoo]

The problem with allowing gravity control is that the same technology required for artificial gravity also gives a reactionless drive. If you can manipulate gravity, then you can trivially build a ship that can accelerate in any direction without any kind of obvious thrust.

This (really) begs the question, CAN you then trivially build a ship blah blah blah? I suspect that square-cube law is enough to completely destroy your argument. Or is it cube-square law? I always get those mixed up.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Cytotoxic]

I may be wrong, but I blamed this on the "Lost" phenomenon. With everyone and his brother pretending that inserting something random into the story was deep and insightful, they thought that it would work for them. The "there's a deeper conspiracy" idea works well, but you have to actually have a deeper conspiracy in mind at the start and stick with it. The good series know the ending before they start. The bad ones just have a single cool idea and then flail around once they've given you the single cool idea. BSG was good because it had a defined story arc in mind - love or hate the ending, at least they had one.

The first season of Heroes was entertaining because they had a formula of slowly revealing special powers and slowly revealing a series of machinations that would lead to the destruction of New York. Once that fate was averted, they just kept piling on powers and conspiracies. After a while they got stuck, so they used a fiat to take away everyone's powers. Then they could start all over with the formula. But it was too late. They had lost the original charm and lost their audience. By the end it just looked like they were throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck. (Oooh, look! Spooky carnival!)

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[drinkypoo]

I have to give BSG a lot of credit for space combat because they did allow ships to turn 180 while still traveling in the same direction.

Give them credit, then, for following in Babylon 5's footsteps. Not only did B5 have space combat with Newtonian physics but they also actually had ships designed for space combat, unlike BSG. In real life you would have space superiority fighters and SEPARATE air superiority fighters if you were planning to do that kind of work as well, and then you'd have at least one more class of attack vessel, a fighter-bomber that could operate in both. Given the physics of B5 though I'd suspect they would have zero craft that could operate in both environments. That means taking the stupid fucking wings off of their fighters.

BSG is an also-ran in the physics department.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[khallow]

They are packed SOOOO tightly into their seats, especially the part behind their crash helmet, that they generally can move their head only a few degrees left and right. If the ship banks like a boat, the pilot will always be pushed "down" into his/her seat.

The thing is that they're fighting someone who's trying to kill them. If you're banking while the other guy is doing high gee turns, you're dead. And it doesn't explain why massive slow ships bank as well.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[domatic]

It occurs to me that masters of the life sciences either ourselves in the far future or some alien race may be able augment meat in extremely creative ways. Suppose that even for a highly advanced race that the easiest way to build reasoning sentient brains is to incorporate meat into the design. Nothing says that it has to be a squishy mass that the first application of 100Gs will turn to pulp. It could be built into a lattice made of more durable materials and enhanced technologically in any number of ways. But it strikes me as too categorical to declare organic material has NO place or function in future spacecraft. Such mastery also means engineering appropriate support for the organic components. They don't necessarily have to bleed like a stuck pig when damaged.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[sourcerror]

". It ties into a fundamental misunderstanding about the capabilities and limitations of evolution and life in general."

You can say the same thing about Alien.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[sourcerror]

"It ties into a fundamental misunderstanding about the capabilities and limitations of evolution and life in general."

Just like Alien.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Gulthek]

Agreed. Better Off Ted was fast realizing itself as a decent replacement for Arrested Development.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Gulthek]

That's because Voyager didn't have characters, it had character roles.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[domatic]

And yeah, realism in this case would mean a lot of BVR combat, with the added element of total silence in space, and that's not going to create the kind of wow-factor and dramatic tension people expect. That's what I was getting at with the "rule of cool" description.

It could if done correctly. There can still be music because everyone understands that the music generally isn't part of the character's world. It's meant to communicate emotional tension to the audience. Anything depicted in space proper should not have associated sound effects but cutways to ship interiors or places where there is an atmosphere CAN have sound effects. If it is done right, the "silence of space" could be used to punctuate things like isolation and vulnerability. Imagine a ship taking weapons fire and we are shown that from the outside. You hear nothing but the music but can see all the glowing and flashing. Then have a quick cut to the desperate pilot who is surrounded by an absolute din as long as his ship still holds air. If the cockpit is breached the silence is a pretty good metaphor for sudden death.

There is a LOT that can be done without insulting the intelligence of anyone who has even a little knowledge. But we'll never see this as long as writers and producers assume a 5th grade level of education in the audience....and I don't mean the geeky 5th grader who devours hard SF.
 

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[rossdee]

Babylon 5 went for 5 seasons, and was the best Science Fiction on TV. And certainly more scientific than most.

I never got into the 'new' BSG but I used to watch the late 70's show with Lorne Green . The science in that was pretty abysmal.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[RichiH]

> Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles may have not had a lot of fans, but those who followed the story really want a proper ending/tie-in with the movies storylines.

That as may be, but the series sucked truckloads of donkey feet.

> Stargate

Oh come on!

Yes, they might cancel stuff that should not have been canceled, but to cite the two above as, and I quote, "TV shows which require a minimum of brain cells to watch"...

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[JerkBoB]

And yeah, realism in this case would mean a lot of BVR combat, with the added element of total silence in space, and that's not going to create the kind of wow-factor and dramatic tension people expect. That's what I was getting at with the "rule of cool" description.

It could if done correctly. There can still be music because everyone understands that the music generally isn't part of the character's world. It's meant to communicate emotional tension to the audience. Anything depicted in space proper should not have associated sound effects but cutways to ship interiors or places where there is an atmosphere CAN have sound effects. If it is done right, the "silence of space" could be used to punctuate things like isolation and vulnerability. Imagine a ship taking weapons fire and we are shown that from the outside. You hear nothing but the music but can see all the glowing and flashing. Then have a quick cut to the desperate pilot who is surrounded by an absolute din as long as his ship still holds air. If the cockpit is breached the silence is a pretty good metaphor for sudden death.

For what it's worth, Firefly's space scenes (combat or otherwise) were pretty much as you describe. For all the fanciful elements of that show, I was surprised at how well they did space physics.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[g4b]

Ok, so there is Rush having a secret which already crumbles, which looks illogical to you. I agree, but I never bothered (while I do bother with logic a lot normally)

And there is the small plot thing. However, SGUs small plots do connect, and the most important thing seems to be human interactions, feelings, dark ambiente, and good acting. Which is kinda modern.
All the time, characters got developed in SG:U at least. Some of them are really fun to watch. I agree, it needs slightly more action, but still it has its own magic, and I never missed an episode anyway.
Especially because it has a very good acting quality by the characters. Not too much senseless emo-talk, but still enough to keep the characters in trouble and going.

I dropped Caprica after seeing the Tennis Match on the "almost tennis-like field", the weird religious stuff, and so on, and moving through the episode denoting, that it is as crap as BSG was, but even worse, without spacefights, which I did not enjoy anyway because of motion sickness caused by the zooming camera. There is *nothing* worse, than the whole Battlestar Remake Franchise. I even enjoy Babylon5: Crusader more. And thats a lot of bad acting there.

For me SG:U is what BSG should have been. And the writing is superb.

But yeah, I hope Destiny finally finds something to explore outside the ship. Maybe some allies, some troubles, and some really bad ass enemy?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe I'm going to say this, but I blame Babylon 5.
Until then everything was stand alone episodes but B5 had a well thought out arc and it worked and was addictive, to the point where I'm still addicted over a decade later. But each episode was a story that stood by itself.

Now it may not have been a complete blockbuster, but it showed there was another way and so lots of shows came along later also having series long arcs (DS9, subsequent Trek and others took on the idea). Some hinting at even longer story lines (Buffy, Stargate SG1 and early Smallville spring to mind here)
Then what happened? Well Lost came along and showed that you don't have to plan it out before as long as you had twists and turns (didn't Dawson's Creek also do this?) As long as you keep the viewer guessing what would happen next then they would have to watch the next episode.
Then of course since that works let's flog that horse to death and have shows that seem to just have the rambling multi season long arcs and forget that the individual episodes matter.
So here we are with SGU that seems to be atmosphere over anything else, BSG where "They have a plan" but they never showed us what it was and I hate to think what will come next.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Really though, this is how every comment section on /. reads. Knee-jerk reactions from people with superiority complexes. I don't bother logging in anymore, don't know why I even bother reading comments.

It's the same crap, over and over again.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only did heroes not require any brain cells to watch, it actively killed brain cells in those who watched it.

And you forgot Firefly.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[elrous0]

If you just want to see shit get blowed up, may I suggest every show on network television?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[rufty_tufty]

"The problem with allowing gravity control is that the same technology required for artificial gravity also gives a reactionless drive."
In a short story i wrote quite a while ago there was a technology where you could make a small singularity. The deck plating therefore had dozens of these black holes per meter and therefore you had gravity. yes it was a little lumpy as the field from one hole mereged with another and there was a noticable gravity gradient (tidal forces from the crew's head to toe). But control of gravity none the less
this then gave you a reall weird ship layout where you would have the floor of one room adjacent to the floor of the room below it (if you can picture that)
They could also create a much large singularity at the front of the ship to cancel out the acceleration forces under hard acceleration - removing the need for g couches.

However there is no way you could use this technology as a reactionless drive that I could think of.

Ok it was a bad short story because hawking radiation would kill the crew, but the idea was there...

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[elrous0]

That's why I like the BBC model you see with a lot of Brit shows (most notably "The Office"): Two short seasons, one or two follow-up specials, end of series. Even when they do run their dramatic series longer, they tend to shake things up after the second season (with a long break or a fresh new set of characters). Series rarely have time to lose their way and start to suck there.

Of course, that means accepting that quantity doesn't equal quality, which is un-American.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[stealth_finger]

This comic illustrates the subject well

That describes 24 almost perfectly!

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare you.

HOW DARE YOU!

He's Scottish, and would glass you if he heard you say that.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[sgtrock]

+1!
.

I can't stand what's happened to my beloved SciFi channel. TechTV became G4. Bad enough. SciFi became home to Friday Night Wrestling??? Now this incredibly stupid name change.
.

The Travel channel is now pretty much a thinly disguised food channel. Discovery jumped the shark years ago. What's left?
.

Sigh. I always knew that the marketing stiffs who ran networks thought of us all with contempt but to be so blatant about it is just amazing.
.

I'm seriously considering dropping my Dish subscription completely at this point. In fact, lately I've been wondering why I'm keeping it. There are exactly 2 channels that hold my interest; IFC and TMC. Both of those could be replaced by Netflix.
.
.
BTW, when did Slashdot quit honoring blank lines between paragraphs?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Zerth]

There are lots of shows doing this already, putting out regular(if not weekly) shows and then sharing ad revenue on Youtube.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to live under a rock. Lost DID wrap up. In 6 seasons. 6 is really far longer than 5...?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[rufty_tufty]

See I kind of likened it to you don't destroy the last small pox virus sample that you have. I assumed that the grand plan was that they were basically frelling around with the humans, keeping them busy, keeping them running, but keeping them contained. All the emo religious rubbish was just a double bluff to lead humans into thinking the wrong things and keeping galactica confident so that they were manipulatable.

Boy was i disappointed at the ending

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I really thought I was more numerous. Turns out there is just one of me.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DrStrange66]

If you found those shows boring perhaps wrestling is more your style. Soon Syfly will cancel all SciFi shows and move to mindless entertainment.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[rufty_tufty]

You're also forgetting the effect of pride.
Let's assume Show A was started by executive A. He is moderately successful and moves on to a different job - from what I hear they move around a lot. Show A is still finding its audience when executive B shows up and is put in charge. If show A is successful then executive B looks bad because it is his predecessor's show. If he outright cancels it then he looks petty. So what does he do? Simple move it around all over the schedule so that it can never find its audience. Or get in touch with a friendly accountant to make it look as if it is losing money. Then it's just the numbers
Likewise if his daughter really likes show B (even if it is mindless trash) then he can move it into a better timeslot, get big name guest stars to appear, give it better publicity bigger budget, all things that will help catch a bigger audience.

I don't think these people are evil, but their motivation is not to produce the best TV it's to give the impression they're doing a good job so they get promoted. If that can be done by taking a crappy nothing show and vastly increasing the ratings by correct investment then i believe they would do it. But with all these things it's the lowest common denominator that wins and the only thing we can do is support the shows and encourage other people to watch good shows, and ideally buy the box sets.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

"...called it Battlestar Galactica. By calling it that, they set a high bar too [sic] meet..."

The original BSG, a high bar to meet? And the re-imagining was "too cheeseball"? Have you considered that maybe you're confusing the two versions?

(And yes, I did watch the original way back when it first aired.)

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DarthVain]

Yes and no.

Yes, TV and everything really, will try to market to the lowest common denominator. To try to appeal to the largest demographic of people, to market to as many as possible, to make as much money by not excluding others. Same reason why if you go to a big chain restaurant and order something "spicy" it really is quite mild, as they are playing to the general crowd.

No that is not only it.

It has to do with money (surprise). Shows like Battlestar are expensive to make. Reality shows, mindless game shows, and crappy sitcoms are cheap and easy to make. So if you make 12 ep of Battlestar for 3m a show, and 10m people watch your getting 120m people for 30m$. If you can make 24 ep of stupid idol for 1,000,000 a show, and 100m people watch, your getting 2,400,000,000 people for 24m$.

Its not surprise which type of show they wish to make. LOST is the only anomaly I can think of to this sort of equation, though its production levels were probably pretty high when compared to shows like the lyric game show, or make a deal, Survivor or other stupid programming.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[BlackSnake112]

The newer centurions also bled red when shot. They were gooey in the inside as well.

I so wanted someone to say when they shot the raider or centurion: "They are gooey on the inside"

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DarthVain]

That said the new Dr. Who is really good, and has a large following (not sure about the US), and it doesn't really look like it has a huge budget.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's ...fiction?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[CAIMLAS]

See, I didn't think the existing season had any filler. Each and every episode had some decent character development - and that, IMO, was the whole appeal to Firefly.

Sure, the Sci-Fi backing was appreciated. But it was a weak backing, and would not have held up to good plot development. There was nothing 'interesting' about the Alliance, and therefore anything built on top of it (in terms of 'complex plots' or the like) would have fell mostly flat. What the Alliance did do was provide a good backdrop for socially complex situations (eg. with River and the Doctor's parents, and the associated commentary).

Which episodes did you think were filler?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[roc97007]

If the shows are stupid, they deserve to be canceled. Bad scifi is not better than no scifi. You need to raise your standards. And discover that there are other things besides tv.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DavidTC]

Erm, what's your problem with a T-1001?

The writers made her a T-1001 instead of a T-1000 just in case they actually did need to do something different with her, like have John try to kill her with cold and it not work. It wasn't 'merchandising', it was caring about continuity enough to use a slightly different model just in case it behaved slightly inconsistent with movie T-1000.

It's worth mentioning her number wasn't even stated on the show, as far as the viewers knew she was a T-1000, so you got your information from somewhere else.

Her character was pretty interesting, too, as it was obvious she wasn't doing 'Terminator' things and didn't actually want John Connor dead, but wasn't really helping him either. She appeared to be trying to set up a competing AI, and apparently came back in time to replace a dead person, which is a Terminator first.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[discord5]

Stargate Universe

Now, I'll have to admit that I simply don't like the show. I really enjoyed Stargate SG-1 (until O'Neill left, after that the show kinda jumped the shark in my opinion), and to some extent enjoyed Atlantis, but SG:U really doesn't do it for me.

Look we don't really need the girl having an alien hiding inside.

SG:U's Big Bad is just terrible. Every episode involving the new Big Bad (or as I like to call them the "Angry Fishpeople") involves some contrived mechanism. First Rush gets captured so they take one of those "communication stones" from him. Then Chloe gets taken from the ship at some point, but lo and behold "communication stones" to the rescue. Then at some point lateron someone suffers from "aftereffects" of the "communication stones" and sabotages the engines, and now we have DNA alteration as a way for the Big Bad to infiltrate the ship. Really, this is just terrible storytelling. It's too sneaky for a Big Bad. They're just Angry Fishpeople right now. The first real attack from the Angry Fishpeople ended in "lol, we've got shields and lasers too", and that was that.

it's not reasonable for Rush to be able to keep the control room secret for this long

But they want this show to have that inner conflict. What else will fuel that conflict than Rush hiding that control room even if your sense of logic tells you "Hey, I can't hide this for long, especially if I start messing around with it". Rush is perhaps the flattest character in the entire show (which is quite the achievement in SG:U), despite that they played the whole dead-wife-card. He's only interested in the ship, and he'll sacrifice anything and anyone except himself to get it. He's got no motivation other than his obsession.

It's contrived and totally out of character for Young to not have Rush followed either physically or electronically at all times at this point.

I was thinking more in the lines of thrown out of an airlock and shot by the Destiny's laser array, but hey followed works too. I mean, Young tried to kill Rush, then left him for dead on a planet. When he returned they play a game of pretend "for the sake of the crew"? After a full scale mutiny, all that happens is "Well, okay, we had that then. Let's just be friends!" ? I mean, things like this have consequences, and the writers do a terrible job at making the audience see those consequences by wiping the slate clean after each story and forcing the status quo from the beginning of the show back in place.

It's about a show having too much dead time and too many contrived conflicts designed to fill same.

No, it's just bad writing in my opinion. There was plenty of conflict on BSG, often contrived but none of it was without consequence like on SG:U. I'll take the mutiny example again. BSG had a mutiny, but it resulted in people getting shot. Something actually happened as opposed to wiping the slate clean.

I've always enjoyed Stargate SG-1 since it was a sci-fi show that wasn't afraid of not taking itself too serious. It was damned formulaic, but it was a pretty good formula. SG:U on the other hand feels like it wants to be the next Battlestar: all grimdark and edgy, but it fails to deliver that because :

• The Big Bad simply isn't scary enough. They fend off a full attack with the push of a button and some subterfuge. That kind of threat doesn't make the atmosphere they're trying to set.
• The conflicts between the characters simply can't be taken seriously because they don't evolve. You simply can't have two people like Rush and Young go against eachother like they have and then press the reset button.
• The story is predictable (eg. You KNOW the instant those people from the cliffhanger in season 1 set a foot aboard that ship that by the second episode some of those people are joining the crew)
• All

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[MadKeithV]

Except that the BSG ending was pretty much made up on the spot and the writers had NO idea that the Final Five idea would take off so hard, so they actually had to ploink faces to the concept late in the story.
E.g., Ron Moore:

It was somewhere in the course of the third season [that the possibility was first raised.] We killed Ellen early that season and we didn’t have an inkling of that at that point. But at the point that we killed Ellen, around the same time frame, I was starting to come up with the idea that there were five Cylons that had yet to be revealed.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DavidTC]

What do you mean? Take every plot point in the movie, like River being triggered, like finding Miranda, etc, and make it an episode, and have an extra episode between those.

There was plenty of stuff for another season.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[LordNimon]

I'm sorry, but any TV show that has been on the air for four years hasn't been canceled, it simply ended. If a show comes to end after more than two years, it's not because of the network executives. It's because the show either told all the stories that it could (e.g. Galactica and Stargate: SG-1), or because it starts going downhill and people no longer like it (e.g. Heroes).

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DavidTC]

No viruses from the crew infecting the ship (BSG, Voyager)

To be fair to Voyager, the ship wasn't living. The gel packs were just used as biological processors, which is much more plausible technology than a ship made of living structural matter. There's at least a subset of scientists today who believe such things can work and would be useful, as opposed to, for example, transporters. If we're grading on the 'Star Trek' curve, they're perfectly reasonable.

Of course, how they were affected by viruses and stuff was totally absurd, but, OTOH, Star Trek's biological underpinnings are pretty absurd to start with, as there are no biochemical boundaries at all. Combine that with their utter lack of any sort of computer security and computer sanity checks, and there you go.

As for BSG, the entire thing was a metaphor. The whole series is about blurring the line between 'machine' and 'living'.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[aesiamun]

Heroes... why did they cancel that? Is there not enough viewers that can follow a story told in a few years instead of a few minutes?

The last season of Heroes was horrible, I just couldn't get into the story at all. Even after finishing the full season, it just didn't work for me. I knew at that point that it probably wasn't going to come back.

Season 1 & 2 were phenomenal IMO.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying it's possible that those who like "intelligent" shows are also the people who tend to believe strongly in intellectual freedom and not reward the creators of the work because they want to stick it to the man, by creating/consuming only illegal copies of the work instead of paying for them? Conversely does that mean that people who don't like "intelligent" shows are willing to pay for/watch commercials during the show that's being created?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DavidTC]

Actually, as another posted pointed out, humans can almost survive in a vacuum anyway, and our skin does fine in a vacuum. You wouldn't want to build a spaceship out it,because if it takes damage the blood can't clot without hitting external oxygen, but by itself, you could stick your hand into vacuum just fine, for quite some time. (In fact, scientists have done that.)

There are three problems in space for living things from earth:

a) Lack of air. Obviously. Easy enough for something the size of a spaceship to get around...presumably, it's breathing the air inside, and like a whale, it lasts a long time. Of course, life doesn't really need 'oxygen' anyway, could live by something like photosynthesis, or a combination of that and burning oxygen.(Maybe via symbiosis, in either direction)
b) Exposed wet membranes. Aka, all orifices and the eyes. Easy enough for evolution to get around by simply building airtight things around those. (You sorta need to be airtight anyway.) Although there's no reason for eyes to be wet anyway....cameras aren't wet.
c) Heat. Can't get rid of it,and life generates heat. That, more than anything, is actually the reason that space suits exist, as opposed to breathing masks. But that's a problem for all space going vessels, so is a bit goofy to worry about only for living things. They'd just have to touch down and discard heat every once in a while, and be 'cold-blooded', by which I mean they'd not have to 'regulate' their body heat, but be able to operate at whatever temperature they were.

So a species living in space is easy. The reason we can't is that our bodies are engineered with 'shortcuts' that make assumptions we will be surrounded by stuff, but there's no reason at all we need to be.

Life probably couldn't start there, but species get pushed towards new climates all the time.

The really tricky thing is propulsion, both to get to and live in space. the only way we have to get to space is throwing stuff out the back, which essentially requires explosive materials to hold enough to get into space. While it's not impossible for life to make use of explosions, it's never actually evolved that way here on earth.

But almost all sci-fi series have invented some manner of reactionless drive, so presumable the life would be using the same concept.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[canajin56]

1. Unobtainium. I realize Tylium was a holdover from the original 70's BSG. But they displayed it having a range of properties that completely exclude it from being any real life element or compound. It would have been trivial to give Tylium the properties of either Deuterium or Helium-3, and simply work from the assumption that the protagonists have different words than us for the elements. Hell, "frak" already established that the writers were ready to sub in one word for another.

The BGS team really should have contacted you, as you apparently have knowledge of every single molecule that not only does exist, but also all molecules and compounds that could ever exist! Why have you not used your knowledge to cure cancer? Surely with your omniscient ability to identify all forms of matter possible, you know which ones can be used to treat all kinds of diseases! But anyway, if they had all their ships run on fusion reactors you'd complain about how unrealistic it is to have a tiny little viper boasting a fusion reactor that burns through a huge portion of an entire tank of Deuterium in a single instant.

4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support).

BSG didn't have any living ships. They had the raiders that were metal ships with an organic brain. The reason they were done this way, rather than flown by a centurion or a built-in AI, is that the Cylons didn't really understand their Resurrection technology. With their Resurrection technology, as long as a Meat Cylon died within range, it could be reborn with no memory loss. Clearly they couldn't adapt that to Centurion Electronic AI technology, because as established in the plot, they didn't really understand the Resurrection tech. Resurrection let the ships learn from their mistakes. Of course, the Law of Narrative means that although they should be greatly superior to human pilots, they still ended up as cannon fodder.

The base-stars were also not living ships. They were metallic ships that had a paste that repaired damage. It was never really explicit if the paste was bacteria (that apparently would fill you with uncontrollable rage) or nanobots (That give you a massive erection). Sharon certainly called it alive, but called the Centurions alive also, so that doesn't mean it's organic life.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Symbha]

It's just good concept, bad writers.
Whedon could have done it, but then peeps you liked would have actually died.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[JWW]

I agree with you that there is no UP direction in space.

But, the gate is most definitely DOWN!!

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Caprica... we know what happened, the story was about filling in the details, which we'll never know. It sure didn't get cancelled because of the decors, special effects or actors IMHO.

No, just the storyline, or lack thereof. The first few episodes were engaging, then it just started to drag. Besides, the Sci Fi crowd doesn't want to see a hot chick trapped in a robot shell. Try it the other way around, and see how it affects the ratings.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[painandgreed]

1. Unobtainium. - I'll give you this one. They probably could have substituted tylium for a fusion material without any affect to the plot dealing with workers, their rights, or the resource scarcity.

2. Magic. - First, off, rational universes are boring. Fantasy is big for a reason and most drama deals with irrational emotions. Two, the events shown never really show magic as much as point towards either a universe that is deterministic, controlled, or chaotic. It seemed fairly deterministic to some degree but deterministic universes are boring because there is no chance of change. It certainly could be controlled, probably by the five cyclons. Substitute five crazy Banks style Minds who are manipulating events, and you have a good explaination of the story. Or the cylon/human interaction could just be considered a chaotic cannonical system as chaotic systems, while not deterministic, are predictable as they repeat within the bounds of their strange attractor. If you see the story as trying to break out of that system to break the cycle (replacing it with a new one), it even matches the themes of the story. Still, you saw magic because that's what you wanted to see. I saw a more complicated universe because that's what I wanted to see. Most likely the writers just thought those parts of the story sounded cool and put them in without thought as to fundamentally why.

3. Space combat. - As we haven't actually fought outer space combats yet, we really don't know. Mostly likely, the range thing just had to be that way for the sake of story telling. The entire days of boredom, seconds of fear that space combat probably would be, just wouldn't make for a story that anybody really wanted to watch. No action. No build up of suspence. Then again, if you really wanted to sit down and do the math, it may turn out that outer space combat needs to take place up close with guns because the amount of fuel needed for missiles over long ranges against moving targets with point defense is simply uneconomical and probably ineffective. To be effective in space combat, you need to get up and close and use direct fire.

4. Living ships. - Seriously, this one I really disagree with you on. Warm meat bags make for wonderful ships in space simply because dumb machines also take radiation and other damage and can't repair themselves. Then it takes factories and workers to repair them. Living ships can repair themselves and are probably more economical than dumb machines. This goes especially true for a story about a race of living machines to begin with. Once you make a ship, that takes on fuel, processes it, self repairing, and controls itself, you essentially have a living creature. I bet we're going to find the same thing out with nanotechnology. Once we end up making a robust von Neumann nanobot, I bet it ends up being really close to a yeast, fungi or bacteria. Any von Neumann probes we end up making will probably be fairly close to a living creature.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DavidTC]

What will help, is convincing the studios not to sign exclusive deals with the networks, and to switch to a business model where they release the pilot, then each subsequent season, under a CC-NC license and don't start producing the next season until they've received enough donations to fund it.

That sentence started out good, and then went into crazy land. No one's going to do that. You can't put actors under contract for show that might happen. You can't film an episode every six months when you get the money....sets cost money to keep, actors have other things, etc.

The only stuff that can get produced at that level is stuff like The Guild, which is a fine show, but functionally airs one-two episodes a year and has 'no sets'. (Or, rather, they borrow sets off the cast and crew and rent locations for the day.) They don't have a studio partner, although they do have a distribution deal now, they didn't the first season. If you haven't watched it, go and do so, like I said, it's a great show, and a good example of what a 'donation supported show' can do...but don't expect something like BSG.

But I see you said 'donations for a season'. Seasons of TV shows cost like five million dollars at minimum. A lot of TV shows are a million an episode. I don't know what sort of 'donations' you're expecting, but just no.

What needs to happen is production companies(1) not sign exclusive deals with networks. They should sign contracts that say we are going to produce at least X episodes of this, and they each cost $Y to buy to air two times. The network promises to buy a certain number of episodes, and can purchase even more, but if they don't we'll keep making them, and sell them to other people, or do whatever the hell we want with them.

What would be really nice is if production companies would build up a small nest egg that would let them keep producing shows even after they were 'canceled', which at the very least would be something to put on the DVD to end the series with (Like Dollhouse did with Epitaph One.), and hopefully would let them carry on long enough to get picked up by someone else.

1) Not studios, studies are just partners. A production company invents an idea (Or, in reality, it's the other way around, someone has the idea and makes the production company.), and they approach a studio to house the sets and provide cameras and crew and facilities, and they split the profits, and together they go find a network to air it. This is where the 'donation' concept falls down...studios can't just 'donate space until people pay for it', sound stages cost money, cameras cost money, crew costs money. You can't leave things sitting empty waiting for enough money to come in.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[roc97007]

> Remember how Voyager had those conflicts with the Maquis and the starfleet crew? Those two or three episodes where at the end nothing had changed at all? That's basically how I feel about SG:U.

Man, you have more patience than I do. I stopped watching Voyager after about six episodes. Man, that was deadly dull. It wasn't just dishwater dull, it was aggressively dull. Like, "Look at this! Now! Be bored!" You could see after the first few episodes that they were gearing up for season after season of small variations on about five plots followed by hard reset so you could show the episodes in almost any order, depending on hardcore Trekkies to keep the show on the air.

> Mark my words: at the end of season 2 they will still be on the Destiny unable to go to earth, Rush and Young will still be in conflict. Telford and Young will still be in conflict. And the Angry Fishpeople will still just be Angry Fishpeople in space firing their lasers at a ship that has shields and lasers (perhaps with the notable exception of a short bout of 30 minutes of sabotage).

You may be right. (I love "Angry Fishpeople". It almost makes me wish that they could loosen up enough to actually use that line.) But one thing is for sure -- if that's the case, there will be one component missing -- this viewer.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Buelldozer]

What's killing SG:U is the lack of fun!

A dark gritty Sci-Fi show is great if your a Sci-Fi nerd who want's a dark and gritty Sci-Fi show. The millions of viewers who stuck with SG through SG1 into SG:A did so at least partially because the show was FUN. It was funny, sometimes irreverent, and on the whole didn't take itself very seriously.

When SG:A ended and SG:U started my wife who is not a Sci-Fi nerd, but who had been with the SG universe since the theater released movie(!), stopped watching after one episode.

The fun was gone and SG:U became another dark and angry Sci-Fi show.

tl;dr They made SG:U into a BSTG clone and killed it losing millions of viewers and probably destroying the franchise.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[nabsltd]

Her character was pretty interesting, too, as it was obvious she wasn't doing 'Terminator' things

And then, when her character did do "Terminator things" (like emotionlessly killing dozens of people), it made the character even more interesting.

The key to a Terminator TV series is that movies don't give you time to show that the machines really do have a long-term plan...the movies imply their only long-term plan is "kill all humans". So, in that regard, the TV series was excellent. Overall, it was quite good, and definitely had what I consider to be the most unexpected scene in all of TV (in the episode "Adam Raised a Cain").

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DavidTC]

And you'll notice that most long running dramas aren't trying to tell a story.

Like JAG and CSI and ER. Each week, there was a problem, and they'd solve it. Meanwhile, each character would develop in some direction a little. (Same with TMNT, minus the character development, if you're talking about the 80s cartoon.)

But the entire thing, as a whole, was not a 'story'.

SG-1 is pretty unique for being a thoughtful, well respected science fiction show that wasn't trying to tell a story, and yet was still very good. SG-1 was the JAG of sci-fi. <craig ferguson>I look forward to your letters.</craig ferguson>

I would argue that six years is too long for most 'story' sci-fi. It was too long for the BSG story, it was too long for Lost. Both of those should have lost a season or two in the middle.

Some series can't even go less than that...Heroes, for example, started sputtering in season two.

B5 is the canonical example of a story that worked for several seasons, mainly because JMS actually planned out about seven interlocking stories from the very start, so no one was surprised when one of them wrapped up and another started happening, because they all overlapped and often you didn't realize you were in a new story until halfway in. And he was smart enough to put smaller stories in movies instead of trying to fit them into either a single episode, where they wouldn't fit, or as premise change for half a season, like Thirdspace would have been.

But most of the 'story' sci-fi series really should be no more than three seasons.

I mean, take Dollhouse. Imagine it had actually had full seasons, so the last episode was the end of the first season. Or, rather, than the second season was stretched out into another season, so the middle of season two is the end of season one, and the end of season two is the end of season two still, but with a lot of padding with Echo on the run, and then an entire season with the House working against Rossum. Boring, huh?

Can you really imagine having five times the number of Dollhouse episodes that were made, for six full seasons? Were they actually going to show us the apocalypse, and keep going? I guess, but at that point we're talking a pretty serious genre shift, aren't we?

Dollhouse was cut short, but frankly it needed twice or maybe thrice as much time as the 'one season' it got. It didn't need to keep running for five or six full seasons.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[nametaken]

I put it bluntly... Caprica was painfully boring and SGU is dancing around right in that same danger area.

We knew it wouldn't be anything like SG1 or Atlantis, but god damn that show moves slowly. I almost want them to throw in some of the goofy old shoot-em-up stuff just so I can feel like something happened.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[nabsltd]

Many don't understand that Sci-fi is big and expensive to make.

Good sci-fi can be made for the same price as any other good series...you don't need millions of dollars of special effects to tell a good story.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[metrix007]

Her number was staed on the show when it showed her HUD. The problem I had with that is that the one number increment was just stupid, and something I would expect out of a merchandising tie in, not a serious show set in the universe.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

While I in theroy want to agree with your 'carbon based ships are done wrong' I think one of your fundamental assumptions is incorrect- that carbon based does not have the capability to exceed metalugical abilities. Carbon nanotubes are hailed as one of the great 'super-matierals' of the near future, possessing strength, resiliance, and construction from a super-common element. Carbon constructs are also what meat is particularly good at doing- some kind of engineered lifeform could potentially be making carbon nanotubes for it's bones, and an exo-skeleton made entirely of carbon naotube plates with soft fleshy goo inside that does nothing but make replacement carbon nanotubes when damaged would be wickedly effective , as well as actually requiring very few materials.

Couple that with other super-strong biological elements, like say spider silk, and a 'trained' biological system that understands how to do gross repair and fine repair separately . Add in photosynthesis for energy storage/production, the ability for individual portions to 'hibernate' like how virri do if exposed to conditions not suitable for metabolism and an ability to process any fundamental life element through multiple 'stomachs' and this ship will be able to happily repair from anything still constituting 'alive' in virtually any stellar environment.

Finally, the centurion fighters could have absolutely been an excersise in efficency; if it was faster/cheaper/easier/used more common materials to grow a flesh brain then it did to build a cyborg brain of equal capabilities then it may have been a simple attrition decision (IE- we can build 50 centurions for every raptor they build, but only 1 true cylon of the same capabilities; build 50 centurions)

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you didn't RTFA.

He says it well. "People with a little bit of science education gave us the most grief. PhD's were more forgiving".

Seems obvious which side you're on. It's a show. There was some magic. But it was better than treknobabble overall (and I say this as an avid star trek fan). Get over it.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[TheRaven64]

That sentence started out good, and then went into crazy land. No one's going to do that. You can't put actors under contract for show that might happen. You can't film an episode every six months when you get the money....sets cost money to keep, actors have other things, etc.

Why not? They do now. That's exactly how it works. A network commissions a season of a show. Some time later, they may commission another season. I'm simply advocating that they cut out the middle man and get the fans to fund it directly. If they receive enough money to create the next season, they do. If not, they return the money to the fans.

Please not, I said 'seasons' not episodes. I'm not suggesting that they raise money for each episode individually, I said that they should raise money for each season. While they're filming a season, they release episodes as soon as they're done and let people share them with their friends and anyone else who might want to watch it. If they like it, they contribute towards the next season. If they've received enough money by the end of season n to fund season n+1, they can start immediately. If not, they can have a short break. If they still haven't after a short while (deadline announced in advance), the show is cancelled and the money is returned.

But I see you said 'donations for a season'. Seasons of TV shows cost like five million dollars at minimum. A lot of TV shows are a million an episode. I don't know what sort of 'donations' you're expecting, but just no.

Five million, divided by how many fans? A million people like it, that's $5 each. Not bad for a season of a show. Half a million like it? That's only $10/show. iTunes sells shows for $2/episode, with DRM. Would you pay $1/episode for a show that you like without DRM? For hard-core fans, combine this with pre-orders for the DVD / BluRay boxed set; they get the download immediately and then get posted the discs when they're produced. People happily pay $20-30 for a DVD boxed set - FireFly is currently for sale on Amazon.com for $30.99 and it was a short season.

How much do people pay to rent a show? How much do people pay for cable TV? How much would you pay to have another season of a show you liked? I enjoyed the Sarah Connor Chronicles, for example, and I'd happily put $20 towards another season. When it was cancelled, it had 4.5 million viewers on its primary network (not counting people watching it on DVD, like me, or via syndication). If half of these would pay the same amount, that gives them $40m for season 3; that's $2m/episode. I'd probably pay $30 if I could download them immediately and get a DVD boxed set once the season was finished. If one million people feel the same way and another two million will pay 50/episode for the download, that gives them over $4m/episode. And if you're not willing to pay 50/episode to keep a show from being cancelled, you probably don't get to complain when they stop making it.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[RsG]

The BGS team really should have contacted you, as you apparently have knowledge of every single molecule that not only does exist, but also all molecules and compounds that could ever exist!

I realize I'm replying to sarcasm, but what the hell.

Tylium actually does have it's energy capacity and other properties given in the episode where they have to blow up a Cylon refinery. To wit:

1. It's much too energy dense to be any sort of chemical compound. We're talking an order of magnitude here. And yes, this is established science, not speculation on my part.

So from point 1 we can establish that Tylium is a nuclear fuel, like Uranium or Deuterium, though whether it fissions or fusions is not specified.

2. It's shown as being highly sensitive to ionizing radiation. A material that breaks down suddenly when nuked would break down gradually when exposed to background radiation. And no, this isn't a question of the fuel being contaminated, Baltar specifies that Tylium is rendered inert if you set off a nuke anywhere remotely near it. But that's only half the problem.

If it becomes inert when exposed to "nuclear radiation" (words taken from the episode), then how is it synthesized? Every element above hydrogen in the universe is produced via nuclear reactions, either in the form of stellar fusion or nuclear decay of heavier elements. Tylium cannot be an element and have the property of radiation sensitivity shown. Even if the nuke were somehow transmuting elements in quantity (which it cannot), if the Tylium were that sensitive, it could never have been formed in quantity in the first place.

So point 2 means it should be a chemical compound. There exist compounds that react to ionizing radiation by breaking down into their constituent elements.

Point 1 makes Tylium a nuclear fuel, and not a chemical one, based on energy density. Point 2 makes it a chemical fuel, not a nuclear one, based on its reaction to ionizing radiation. This cannot be reconciled without making it unobtainium. Ergo, the writers failed to do their research properly.

Per your comments about living ships, I've done that to death elsewhere in this thread, and won't bother repeating my points here. Suffice it to say, if you're like me and know biology, the whole "ship with self-repairing goo" and "ship with a fleshy brain at the helm" cliches get very old after a while.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[roc97007]

> Also, why is it suddenly fashionable to split seasons into two? SGU and Caprica both just stopped half way through their first seasons. I watched SGU thinking that it was just slow to get going, but being told that the next episode is six months away, without any sort of season finale type episode to prepare me for it, really killed my interest in the show. Same for Caprica.

I think it's the latest method for a show to commit suicide. Yeah, let's move along reeeealalllly slowly, and then go on hiatus for weeks so that people forget about us. And then, when we start up again, they won't remember or care what was going on. Yeah, that's a good plan. Almost as good as going to reruns mid-season.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[wickedskaman]

I'm pretty sure Muppetscape got all the mileage they were going to get out of it. It wasn't exactly hard hitting and edgy.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[neurophil12]

I was less bothered by the idea of the final five, which I thought actually worked pretty well, and more bothered with the idea that they didn't know what to do with the Opera House imagery. I mean, the integration of the final five plot worked. The Opera House stuff really did feel tacked on at the end. It had very little ultimate effect, and was just used to say, "here, we're using it, so we're not leaving you hanging." The real problem in the end was Moore deciding to go with his lame and unspecific view of what "god" is. You can have a god that is just the energy and flow of events in the universe, and you can have a god that is cognizant and causing very specific things to happen (reappearance of Starbuck), but you can't have it both ways. The better solution would have been one of the existing characters, or some new character, having been the driving force of things, and they could claim that they were inspired by god or some higher power. That way you still get to have it both ways but it could be convincing.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[RsG]

Okay, where do they say the ships in B5 and Farscape are carbon based? In BSG the ships are perfectly mechanical aside from the pilot. In Farscape and B5 the ships are made of horribly alien materials and it's generally noted many times how absurdly alien their biology is.

Actually, I'll need to double check the B5 one, since I'm less sure than I was before googling it, but I do remember Farscape's Leviathans being stated/shown to be carbon based.

You are once again limiting your definition of life to things which are like life on Earth. A 100% mechanical spaceship with an AI and a repair facility that can make copies of itself is alive. Electricity transfer energy and metal is the building block.

Agreed.

And now that I've shocked you by agreeing with you, reread about three of my posts in this thread where I address that very issue.

"Living ships" that use AI, robotics and self-repairing materials are perfectly fine by me. Saberhagen Berserkers, which Cylons owe a lot of their inspiration to, are alive by this definition, and I would champion them as an excellent example of hard sci-fi. I don't have a problem with the type of living ship you bring up in this paragraph.

I have a problem with ships that are made of meat. Space whales, bio-ships, call em what you want. And no, making the ship partly mechanical doesn't excuse it from this.

Want to know what sort of biological components I will accept as starship parts? The life system. Make the biological elements part of air and water reclamation, or food synthesis, and I'll call it realistic. Make the pilot a brain-in-a-jar and I'll reserve judgment until I see what the writer used to justify it (which BSG did poorly). Those are where I see the use of organic parts as sensible.

We're talking about fucking science fiction series, every bloody ship breaks fifty laws of physics by just existing. Do you comprehend how large the heat sinks would need to be for even the most trivial of spaceships to not melt into slag inside of a single episode? The laws of physics the show operates under are explicitly different from our own or they have found ways to break them.

The need for heat sinks would be proportional to the heat generated, and thus variable depending on ship type and solar proximity. Technically, what you really want are radiators and circulating coolant. And you're quite correct that most series get this one badly wrong (showing a ship freezing instead of frying), but I'm mostly only bothered by this when the mistake becomes a plot point. Like a character who should know better talking about it being cold in space, or referring to the need to keep a ship heated (Firefly did this once, Star Trek several times).

Actually, this perfectly illustrates my point. I am fine with a ship involving many, many pieces of "black box" technology. I don't need to see how every damn piece of equipment operates, because that wouldn't make for good viewing.

Where I get into sci-fi curmudgeon mode is where the technobabble become a plot device and is either poorly explained, or contradict real life elemental science (like inventing new elements on the periodic table, or mangling the theory of evolution). In BSG, the Cylon biotech in their ships was a plot device, whereas the cooling systems were left alone, hence why I single out the former and overlook the later.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[RsG]

The problem with allowing gravity control is that the same technology required for artificial gravity also gives a reactionless drive. If you can manipulate gravity, then you can trivially build a ship that can accelerate in any direction without any kind of obvious thrust.

Ehhhhhhhh, kinda.

Okay, backing up, if the artificial gravity generator behaves like if often does in soft sci-fi, then you're absolutely right.

But if you want to make a gravity generator that obeys the laws of motion, there is literally nothing stopping you, and it would be much more realistic than the alternative.

You make the attraction between generator and crew mutual. If the deck plating is pulling you down at a comfortable 1G of pull then it is also being pulled toward your feet at the same force. The balance of force is neutral.

This allows cabin gravity and inertial compensation, and for that matter some other cliches like tractor beams, without allowing reactionless drives. You could still build a gravity based reaction drive, which would probably resemble an ion drive in terms of thrust output, using generated gravity to expel reaction mass.

Note that for stuff like inertial compensation, you'd want the generators to been firmly moored to the ships structure.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[RsG]

I did RTFA. And that sounds very much like a man trying to ditch his critics to me.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[teh kurisu]

Almost as good as going to reruns mid-season.

Fringe did that this week. Colour me unimpressed. But it gets a pass because it is all kinds of awesome.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Phoshi]

The reason is that there was never any such thing as FTL communication, and jump drives were pretty big things. You'd basically need to steal a ship, do the jump calculations yourself (Which, if you recall, took Galactica's computers about 20 minutes - and they were designed to do it as quickly as possible, so civilian ships would surely take significantly longer (And while the galactica was an old ship, it was shown that ships were upgraded across time, so there's no reason to believe it was old technology in the ship herself, just an old ship)), and even then, the fleet could jump out in just a few seconds if they were prepared, which they always were - and as there's no such thing as FTL communication, the cylons would still have no idea where they were, except they were down at least one spy. The moment the fleet stopped moving (New Caprica), the cylons managed to pick up their lightspeed emissions (Well, a nuke, but I assume they would have eventually found radio transmissions otherwise). So, there's a very good, very well explained, reason in the show, and it all boils down to "FTL is hard, you can't do it without a ship" and "FTL is easy, if you can do it, you can keep it ready to go well before your enemy gets close".

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[cyberfunkr]

Heroes... why did they cancel that? Is there not enough viewers that can follow a story told in a few years instead of a few minutes?

Actually, yes. "Lost" suffered from the same grand arcing scheme. Everything built upon everything. You couldn't miss a couple of episodes without being lost in the mire of "what's that about?" and "why is the important?" questions.

I believe it was the the SciFi channel (back before they lost meaning) showed "Lost 2.0" with pop-ups to help people follow along. After seeing "This is the same polar bear from episode XX" I lost complete interest. I knew there was so much more to the story and I'd never catch up.

So for shows like Heroes, Lost, and so forth, unless you get in at the beginning, you're not as likely to want to start watching. With little new viewer uptake, your numbers can only go down and thus great shows get canceled.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Dishevel]

The networks are not at fault. Its the fucking Moo Cow public that watches crap over good shows that makes the network make those decisions.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[TheRaven64]

Except that there is FTL communications in the BSG universe. In the episode 33 1/3, the Cylons have the fleet's position fast enough to jump there half an hour later and they state that the spies are getting information to the Cylons somehow.. More importantly, Cylons that die awake on the resurrection ship or on a planet immediately. If they were constrained to light speed for this, then it would take a very long time for any resurrections to happen off planet (on the order of years, even if you're relatively close - i.e. closer than the nearest star). The humans don't seem to use FTL communications, but the Cylons do.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Sci-fi Channel my ass. Pardon me, "SyFy Channel", whatever the FUCK that means.

That's: SyFy(tm)

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DavidTC]

Her number was staed on the show when it showed her HUD.

You were able to actually read that? Well, okay.

The problem I had with that is that the one number increment was just stupid, and something I would expect out of a merchandising tie in, not a serious show set in the universe.

All the terminators had different numbers in the series had different numbers, mainly because they were different actors. Although, strictly speaking, it's the model that's the skin, Arnold is model 101. The T-xxx designation is the metal framework and CPU, so two identically sized actors could be the same T- but different models, whereas Arnold played both a T-800 and a T-850, both model 101. (There's actually a model 90, too, which has no skin at all, but is human sized and shaped for fighting in human tunnels.)

But, anyway, the main villain terminator in TSCC was T-888, and while Cameron never got a designation, she clearly wasn't either an T-800, T-850, or T-888 as she's much too small. (Considering her never-before-seen skill at mimicking actual human emotion, fanon has her as a T-9xx. Alternately, as she was specifically designed to infiltrate the resistance far enough to kill John Connor, it's possible she's a one-off and has no model number.)

Granted, that's for the metal-exoskeleton terminators. The T-1001 could have been a T-1000 without worrying about the actor, considering it doesn't 'really' look like any actor. But, like I said, the producers wanted to be able to pull a cat out of the bag in case they needed some surprise, without having to justify why this T-1000 is different from T2's T-1000.

I have no idea why you object to that number specifically. Is it because all the other numbers were even? Frankly, that's stupid in my book. I'd have liked to see more arbitrary naming. Why 888 instead of 874? Did people name it or machines?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[DavidTC]

Five million, divided by how many fans? A million people like it, that's $5 each. Not bad for a season of a show.

You've taken the absolute lowest cost imaginable and compared it to absurdly high ratings.

Five million is the crazy low estimate for a science fiction series. Five million can barely get you a season of a sitcom with no-name actors. For example, Breaking Bad costs 1.3 million an episode. Stargate SG-1? $1.5 million.

But, hey, don't believe me, go look at a series that is doing as much as it can, called Sanctuary on sci-fi. Before they were picked up by SyFy, they did eight 15-minute or so webisodes. Virtual sets, as limited production costs as they can manage, using new camera tech and green screens.

Cost of that? 4.3 million total. It cost $32,000 a minute.

That's, um, $31 million for a real season of 22 45 minute episodes. That's obviously $31 a person if a million people watch it.

And a million viewers for a non-broadcast show is insane. Wildly popular broadcast shows get maybe eight times that. The highest rating a science fiction TV series has ever gotten was 3.2 million, with an SG-1 episode.

A million people is what unpopular broadcast shows get. And you think a TV series can pick up a third or even a sixth as many viewers based on the pilot?

More importantly, you think a third or a sixth as many people will pay for it, which I remind you they do not for broadcast shows?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[T-Bone-T]

Real massive slow ships bank when turning, too. It just isn't very noticeable because they turn slowly and thus have a shallow bank.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[khallow]

Real massive slow ships bank when turning, too. It just isn't very noticeable because they turn slowly and thus have a shallow bank.

That's ok, when it's a big boat in the ocean. It's a wee bit less realistic when it's a big spaceship in space.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Dirk Benedict's Slashdot user ID found.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. As a regular reader of Slashdot, it was QUITE apparent that Ron Paul would be elected to the Oval Office in 2008 after winning the GOP primary. We know how both of those went.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[roc97007]

Let's not get sidetracked. This is not about "shit getting blowed up".

It's not an either/or issue.

Either we have long LONG passages with characters discussing their feeeeeelings, the only thing separating the show from General Hospital being the sound of air recyclers in the background and the odd girder or funny door on the set,

Or we gone an' done blowed up a lota shit.

If those are the only choices, I'm selling my damned tv.

Caprica didn't fail because they didn't blow up a lotta shit. Mindless violence is every bit as boring as mindless emoting. Just because they blowed shit up doesn't make it a good action movie. And just because they look concerned and talk endlessly doesn't make it cerebral. Ok? Geeze.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[roc97007]

So with that kind of investment in Battlestar, why the devil did they *try* to make it boring as snot? I stuck with it through season 2, but I just couldn't stand the same people saying the same things over and over again. Yeah, you're a drunk! We get it! Does it really take three MILLION dollars to film 43 minutes of people arguing about relationships?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[metrix007]

You were able to actually read that? Well, okay.

Oddly enough, my media player has pause functionality.

I object to the one number increment because it just seems so lazy. It wasn't the main problem for me, so much as Shirley Manson's terrible terrible acting.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support)..

The Zerg Swarm would like a word with you.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

They could, in fact, get help from the ship through the gate. If you recall, Colonel Young, who "helps" him by suffocating him to death, got there through the gate. They could have called for anesthesia (which they do have) and a cutting tool (which they have, even if they have to use a cutting torch) and enough people to simply lift it off by pure force if they didn't have a lever. Then he would have had a fighting chance to survive. Especially since they can get an actual doctor at any time with the communication stones (though I'll grant that they might not have had enough time for that). If it was just his legs, then they stood a good chance of saving him. If it was internal bleeding, then it's still a definite maybe. Instead, because he complains that he's in pain (which is actually probably an excellent sign that he could make it from a medical point of view), Young kills him. Personally, I think that people in true, chronic, incurable, unbearable pain should definitely have the option of suicide, even assisted suicide. The alternative, for some people, is horrible. If it's transitory pain, then you let them suffer while you try to save them. If I'm ever dying in some bloody mass on the sidewalk and the EMTs try to stop the bleeding and I scream that it hurts and that I'd rather die, I don't want them to kill me instead. Because, even if I want it in that particular moment, with all my heart, I know for a fact I don't want it if there's a chance for survival in the here and now. I also know that, if I'm still alive after the fact, I would be glad that they didn't kill me, even if, in those moments of pain, I cursed them for not killing me. That's the sort of reality that medical professionals have to deal with. It's also the sort of reality that freaking commanding officers have to deal with. If the patient is still able to communicate lucidly with you, then there's still hope.

This is the problem with writing like this. Young is clearly an unhinged psycho based on the actions that the writers have had him take, however, it seems that the writers don't want him to actually be one. They're just playing the desperate times call for desperate measures game. Everyone's actions are ultimately forgivable because of the situation blah blah blah. It's obvious that they're trying to be Battlestar Galactica. Cold-hearted actions aren't new for Stargate series. Jack O'Neill did some pretty cold-hearted stuff too, but it was never like this, it was usually in the heat of battle, or with truly difficult moral calculations to make.

The SGU writers seem to understand that flawed characters can indeed make for interesting stories, but they don't quite grasp that it's entirely possible to make the characters irredeemable. The situation, as written and performed, makes Young irredeemable. He was in command and he didn't even try to save the life of someone under his command. Instead he followed an irrational request to kill him when there was still plenty of hope for his survival. That's either monstrous, or at least monstrously incompetent. The thing is, I know that I'm expected to see it as an action of mercy from a competent, if troubled character. So, I am, for the moment, suspending disbelief on that one and choosing to accept the writers plot railroading that says that his death was guaranteed and the only options were to kill him or let him suffer agonizing pain until he died. I'm willing to take a few of those and mentally darn the plot holes into something that makes sense and lets Young off the hook too a certain degree and imagine him as a legitimate mercy killer rather than the cold-hearted murderer the real world logic of the situation makes him. Too many of these little mental repairs end up making a show unwatchable though. Galactica reached that point for me. I hope SGU doesn't. Perhaps they have yet to surprise me and give a proper treatment of Young's actions in the future: relieved of command for the rest of the series. Unlikely to go down that way though.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Thing 1]

BSG was not canceled. It ran its full run. Caprica, on the other hand, was canceled; I rather enjoyed it, especially "New Cap City" and the tie-ins to GTA.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Thing 1]

The centurions were outdated designs and didn't seem too capable (possibly to prevent another rebellion).

Am I the only one who felt anew the pain of circumcision when they were talking about removing the centurions' higher functions? (I suppose more like a lobotomy, but still it's removing something you were "designed" with.)

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[stunted]

Yes but good fiction is a mirror with which we see our very nature, & science fiction is often the mirror we turn on the uglier aspects of our selves.

From black people in space in TOS to the morality of suicide bombing and questions about the nature of humanity in BSTG, Scifi writers have used the genre to point out the inconsistences in the prevailing moral zeitgeist, the constant falling back on magic is just sloppy writing & robs the story of any teaching power it might otherwise have had.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[WCLPeter]

They didn't, for some reason. For the series to make sense, this reason needs to exist. In both iterations of the show, it's been pretty weak.

Actually, even though it was the "cheesier" show, the reason from the original Battlestar made a lot more sense, and was way more evil, than the remake.

Original:

Using Baltar's insights of Commander Adama we will root out the last pockets of humanity for extermination. We'll follow just outside of their sensor range and if the Colonials stop for too long we will merely send a patrol, make it look like Baltar's idea so he is none the wiser, to spook them into moving. Lets not bug them too much though, we don't want to tip them off we're following. Wow, look at all the human colonies for us to destroy!

Oh crap, they figured out we're following them. No problem, we'll just tell Basestar 5 to let itself get destroyed, we can always rebuild it, because our newly updated scanners will let us hide further back and the Basestar's destruction will lull them into a false sense of security; hopefully they'll stop looking for us. Once the Galactica has led us to Earth, the evidence we found on Kobol was pretty convincing for its existence, we will send the rest of the fleet to crush it with overwhelming force and finally remove the scourge of humanity from the face of existence.

Remake:

We hate our creators because they treated us like slaves! Though we fought for our independence and beat them they might try to enslave us again so we better kill them all off! Oh crap, the biologicals we created to infiltrate the Colonies and prepare for our invasion now feel all bad about killing the creators. Now they want to procreate with them and help repopulate the species but unfortunately there are no humans left.

Wait, no, there are some left! Whew! Turns out Commander Adama wasn't as gullible as the rest of them and managed to escape with a few, lets tell the Humans we're really really really sorry about the whole blowing up their planets and trying to kill them thing and try to make friends. Okay, so they're not buying it. ;-(

Hey Cavil, go pretend to be a dick so the other models will hate you and go whining to the humans about how it was really all your fault for the holocaust, hopefully the humans will feel sorry for the rest of the models and they will join forces to fight you! It'll really help if you start complaining about wanting to be a robot instead of a human and if we're lucky they'll feel sorry for the other biologicals and want to make babies with them, we can then build you a nice robot body after we've dumped them all on some planet somewhere while we take the rest of the fleet and go exploring!

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Thing 1]

You know, you got me thinking, in a parallel sort of way, asking about the different chemistries.

We are starstuff. The stars we have been through have burned long enough to give us the current abundance of atom types that we currently have.

So then that got me thinking about the products of stellar explosions billions of years from now. Perhaps they'll be made of even more exotic elements, further down the periodic table than we've even discovered yet.

This then leads to so many possibilities it's difficult to continue this thought in a concise post.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Vastad]

I hope whoever thought we needed a series of Stargate: Relationship Drama and No Action got fired..

They could stay with the Drama but No Action formula, but ship over the writers who do the South Korean dramas which have literally-frothing-at-the-mouth rabid fans across all of Asia, language barrier notwithstanding, and always seem to be able to tell their story within a single season of 20 or so episodes.

There must be something universal in their tropes or stories that hooks people across all cultural barriers and it might just be a good story as well. I mean, it's not like the actors and actresses are any prettier or any better at acting, and they achieve a lot with just a crew set up in a soundstage apartment, office and the occasional exterior shot.

Heck, maybe even do something crazy like commission the manga-ka who wrote Kimagure Orange Road or even Sailor Moon to write a story outline and flesh it out for TV. Couldn't possibly end up worse than what's already on air.

I'm imagining a Tim Curry as an aged Tuxedo Moon, taking on an apprentice to pass on the super secret skills of his "Magic Tackle" and his "Mask with Lazors" and a new female guest star every week to be saved with their massive phallic starship of "mysterious orifice".....oh and origin. Every episode is "We're gonna die, let's have sex...OH! The ship saved us....sorry, gotta dump you now..."

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[meimeiriver]

Heroes -- Simply ended with Season 1. The rest was drivel.

Caprica -- I saw Caprica's cancellation coming from the first episode aired. Why? Because it's premiss was based on a level of science that would embarrass even a 2nd Grader. To accept Caprica you had to be incredibly dumb and paranoid: "Yeah, let's just collect all data from you on the Internet, put it together inside a chip, and, tada, we have an A.I. with an almost identical personality to yours." Riiiight. Like I said, in reverse order, you'd have to be pretty paranoid to think that much data is available online about you; and you have to be pretty dumb to believe you can create an A.I. like yourself from just your Facebook data and such. Get real.

Of course, Caprica never recovered from its inherently flawed premiss. The Tauron 'mafia' plot was mildly amusing at times, but you can't carry a whole series on that. I'm surprised it hung in there as long as it did.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Phoshi]

Hm, you've got me with the former. The latter I'd argue that they don't know how it works, so can't reasonably use it to convey information, but you do indeed have me with the first. I wonder why it wasn't used in The Plan, though?

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[meimeiriver]

Am I to understand you're inferring that you thought Caprica was some sort of intellectual show? LOL. Well, I suppose, in a Kindergarten sorta way, they tried to be philosophical; but, of course, failed miserably because A) they couldn't get the science right (not even enough for a suspension of disbelief); and B) because said attempts at waxing 'philosophical' (like Dr. Graystone wanting to teach his A.I. wife, Amanda Graystone, new tricks) were based on the same bad science. Or absence thereof, rather. Just telling your A.I. wife that she needs to be more 'real' is not being philosophical -- that's just being stupid.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[meimeiriver]

With all due respect to your wife, 'fun' is not the standard by which everything ought to be measured. Crime and Punishment isn't fun; Macbeth isn't fun, etc. Yet these are all great works. And it's okay for your wife to walk away when it's not sufficiently light entertainment enough. Personally, though, I applaud it when something is NOT about fun, for a change.

And no, the absence of fun does not mean it's "great if your a Sci-Fi nerd who want's a dark and gritty," but is simply for people who want something serious.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support).

There's a reason for implementing ''living ships'' in SF. A future resilient material should have the ability to regenerate itself either by biological means or by nanobots, form memory - living-like method, but I agree that the design of a future ship should shift more from a living entity towards a brain dead regenerative material.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

Cool. Please provide your credit card details, a scan of both sides of your key set, and your residential address. Could you also please note times when you are not likely to be home, and any alarm codes you may have.

Thanks.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[mfh]

The pilot for Caprica was good. I could tell you where they went wrong with it... after the first episode.

What was missing:

Robot rampage.

She could have pwnd everyone for fun and horror, hacked into New Cap City and transported all the people's minds into other robots.

This could have all started on epsisode 2.

I'm not sure who to blame... probably controlling creative.

From there she could have waged war, built the cylon army and destroyed human civilization on all the colonies. The war between humans and cylons could have started almost immediately.

But instead... we get a long boring plot filled with trite about terrorism.

LIKE WE HAVE NOT HEARD ENOUGH ABOUT TERRORISM???

I am disappointed with Caprica... because it could have been amazing and it didn't live up to its predecessor.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

The networks keep canceling all good TV shows and instead keep crap like American Idol and 90210 alive.

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Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[mlush]

I think it's a big problem with US shows, over UK ones.

US shows usually have 12-24 episodes to a series, and tend to produce them until viewing figures demand cancellation. UK series are often 6 episodes long, and tend not to be plugged to death.

At that sort of low intensity, a show can stay fresh for a great many years without running out of steam.

Thats British Brevity (Warning tv tropes link!) for you and there is a lot to be said for it :-)

Had Flashforward had 12 episodes to get to the money shot the would have had to really think about the how may subplots needed to tell the story.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Buelldozer]

I agree with you! There is nothing wrong with serious Sci-Fi and I enjoy it myself.

My issue is specifically with the Star Gate series. It was never serious it was never dark and gritty it was always light hearted and fun Sci-Fi. The kind of stuff you can watch with your wife and kids on "Sci-Fi Friday".

With SG:U they changed the direction of the entire Star Gate franchise. It went from light hearted and irreverent to taking itself entire too seriously.

Serious Sci-Fi is good but the SyFy channel twisted up a show with *15* season of history and *three* movies in order to have something more BSG-like. It was stupid and it's just about killed the SG franchise. If they wanted more BSG they should have ordered that and left Star Gate alone.

Now the BSG prequel has essentially failed and the sole SG show is on the verge of being cancelled.

Way to go SyFy channel, you've managed to kill not one but TWO excellent Sci-Fi shows!

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[sorak]

Old post, I know, but I wanted to comment on this:

Stargate Universe was slow to start (hey, the damn ship was falling apart), too bad too many viewers stopped watching. Their loss may end up being everyone's loss.

The ship falling apart was one of the things I loved about the first few episodes of SGU. The whole notion of people who really don't know what they're doing, on a ship that is falling apart, spending every week trying to figure out "how do we power this thing? How do we jury rig a life support system? Where does our food come from? Who's in charge?"

I haven't watched the last four episodes because they're getting away from that and getting more toward "on no! Bad guy!! Beat him up and take his gun!!!"

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[msi]

I have read or seen a show where they use an artificial gravity to reduce the effective mass of a ship zero and then can use a tiny engine. I am going to be looking through my bookcase all weekend now this is anoying me.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Yvan256]

Adding 100 would have been something a human would have done. It was the next model in the series, so it's current_model+=1. There's nothing more mechanical and logical then to add only one to a model number.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[khallow]

So then that got me thinking about the products of stellar explosions billions of years from now. Perhaps they'll be made of even more exotic elements, further down the periodic table than we've even discovered yet.

It has to be stable. My view is that given we have a lot of uranium on Earth, which is the most massive, relatively stable element that we know of (that is, half-life on the scale of Earth's history), we've probably already reached the limits attainable by supernovas (and probably have already found all isotopes, stable over billions of years). It's also worth noting that the truly exotic chemistry is on the low end of the periodic table. Carbon, for example, is the building block for a vast number of chemicals to the point that study of carbon-based chemicals (called "Organic Chemistry") is its own field.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Ihmhi]

Winston Rowntree is a pretty good comic artist. You can check out more of his stuff here.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[alexo]

The series ran until the story ended, then it ended. May god grant that happens more often.

RIP, Farscape season 5.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Thing 1]

Wasn't going for funny. More like, regime change.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Grishnakh]

Not having watched UK TV (except things I've downloaded on BitTorrent), I'm curious: how are these series aired if there's only 6 episodes? Is it one episode a week like in the US? If so, what do they do for the other 46 weeks of the year, or is a season a shorter length than a year?

For those who don't know, US seasons are one year long, and usually 22-26 episodes, one per week. The other weeks are reruns, so about half a year of new stuff, and half a year of reruns until the next season of the show.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Grishnakh]

This is why they need to do things completely differently. They need to design these shows from start to finish before ever shooting them, decide how many seasons there will be (and that number should be limited, perhaps to 5, because when they go too long they always suck), and the network should sign on to the whole thing or nothing.

The way they do things now, with the network only ordering a handful of episodes at a time, is what causes the shows to be shitty, because the writers have to write as if that's all there will be, and then when the network orders more episodes, then they have to come up with some stupid plot twist or something to extend the series. The whole thing should instead be designed like a really long mini-series, without any danger of the plug being pulled early. If they did this, the writing could be much better, and there'd be more viewership too. Basically, with the way the networks do things now, they're causing the shows to suck, which causes people to not watch them for very long, and then the show gets canceled and the networks wonder why.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Grishnakh]

The science in the new BSG was pretty decent, although there were a few things that were rather anachronistic (cassette recorders, radios). Basically, BSG avoided a lot of technobabble by keeping the technology minimal, except of course for artificial gravity and FTL jumps, without which you simply couldn't have a TV show about people traveling to other planets. But aside from those two necessities, the weapons were all projectile weapons like ours (guns and missiles, no lasers), the fighter ships actually maneuvered properly in zero-g, etc.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Grishnakh]

"Filler episodes"? This is a TV show, not a movie. The whole nature of TV is different from a movie, where you only have 90-150 minutes to squeeze your entire story into. TV shows are supposed to have a certain amount of "filler" that adds some character development, but without being absolutely necessary to the plot; it's one of the luxuries of having so much time, and keeps things from being too rushed. It lets you immerse yourself more into the characters' universe.

Basically, what you're advocating is movies only (and maybe short mini-series). You should stop watching TV altogether, as you'll never be pleased by any TV show.

Re:Doesn't matter what he did

[Grishnakh]

4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support).

Oh please. There's nothing wrong with this idea, and in fact, it makes a lot of sense, because it's much more efficient to have biological lifeforms do your work for you, automatically, than to do it yourself. Remember, just a day or two ago on Slashdot, there was an article about someone developing a new bacteria that repairs concrete cracks! Sounds like a precursor to "living" structures to me. Obviously, a whole ship isn't going to be a bunch of flexible cells, but we consider ourselves "living", and our bodies have many hard items in them, namely bones and teeth, though these were formed by living processes rather than manufacturing. The idea of a spaceship being "grown" really isn't that fantastic, and is somewhat plausible for a society with very highly advanced biotechnology.

2. Magic. B5 and star trek have been guilty of this too. Is it too much to ask that a sci-fi series stick to a rational universe? Or at least leave sufficient ambiguity that the few supernatural events might have been natural ones instead?

They have to throw that one in there for all the religionists. Remember, the entire idea for the show comes from Mormon mythology, even the name of their original planet Kobol (the Mormons believe God lives on the planet Kolob). But yes, I agree, more ambiguity would have been better. But remember, at the end, it was shown that some sort of higher beings (who make themselves appear as Baltar and Number 6) were helping to guide events.

I'll give free passes on FTL and generated gravity, as those are virtually prerequisites for the type of setting involved.

Yep, there's no way to get around those for a TV show about people traveling between star systems. It did seem a little out of place, however, considering that much of the rest of their technology wasn't much different from our own: machine guns, pistols firing bullets, medicine no more advanced than ours, etc., and all this from a culture that was star-faring 2000 years earlier (when they traveled from Kobol to the 12 Colonies)?

I don't like syence fyction any more

[Anonymous Coward]

it's just not the same

Re:I don't like syence fyction any more

[Yvan256]

Why? You don't like pro wrestling?

Re:I don't like syence fyction any more

[guybrush3pwood]

You should read more. There're probably more great sci-fi books out there than you think. In fact, you shouldn't watch TV at all...

Re:I don't like syence fyction any more

[Anonymous Coward]

That whooshing sound you just heard? That was the point flying past.

Re:I don't like syence fyction any more

[xSander]

Mod parent up.

I haven't watched anything SF since Battlestar Galactica. Didn't bother with Caprica, especially after that crap ending BSG had.

But there are thousands of SF books.. I'm currently reading Peter F. Hamilton's The Neutronium Alchemist, part two in the Night's Dawn trilogy. Not by any means a recent book, but that doesn't matter... it's a good book/trilogy so far. I'll buy Hamilton's Void trilogy books too, I think.

Re:I don't like syence fyction any more

[slapout]

It's certainly got more fiction that a lot of the stuff on "SyFy". Not sure about science though

Re:I don't like syence fyction any more

[roc97007]

Steroids. There's science in that. I think.

I don't think that word means what you think ...

[khasim]

Grazier didn't just make sure that there was a reason for what we saw - bullets instead of lasers - but also that when the science bit did break into the open, it was more mind-blowing than the writers could have conceived - such as when the humans discover their mechanical Cylon persecutors have evolved to look human.

Yes, that is one sentence.

But I don't think "evolved" is applicable in this situation.

mind blowing?

[roc97007]

Ok, let's get one thing straight -- the Cylons "evolving" into human form was not "mind blowing". It just wasn't.

It looked like a shameless ploy to reduce production costs, (which it probably was) and to have a bunch of scenes with James Callis dry-humping Tricia Helfer (which got tiresome after the second or fifth time).

Re:mind blowing?

[Anonymous Coward]

So was the transporter on Star Trek. Doesn't minimize the effect it's had on real-life science since then.

Re:mind blowing?

[TFAFalcon]

Well half the series was based on the fact they the humans couldn't identify the Cylons living among them. That would be pretty hard to pull of if the Cylons were all 3m tinmen.

It might have reduced production cost, but it also gave the series most of its subject matter.

Re:mind blowing?

[martin-boundary]

The storylines would have been virtually unchanged if the human looking cylons had been actual human traitors and fanatic cylon sympathisers instead.

Re:mind blowing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The storylines would have been virtually unchanged if the human looking cylons had been actual human traitors and fanatic cylon sympathisers instead.

Are you kidding? Cylon sympathizers know who they are. They don't think they're humans fighting the good fight against the machines until they find out they aren't. They don't have to make a choice between what they really are and what they always thought they were. It would have been a totally different show.

Re:mind blowing?

[ScrewMaster]

So was the transporter on Star Trek. Doesn't minimize the effect it's had on real-life science since then.

Sure, because it avoided more expensive Shuttle sequences. But the fact remains that the Transporter, as implemented by Roddenberry's effects people, was way cool and added another plot dimension that otherwise would have been unavailable. I don't know what particular effect the Star Trek Transporter had on real-life science, considering that it was a very, very old idea in science-fiction even then.

Deciding to make the robots in one's production look like humans is a legitimate cost-cutting measure, I suppose, but don't try to justify it on any other terms. It was just cheap, and really added nothing of value. Besides, the original series' Cylons were impressive machines. They were black and silver, very shiny, and had that nifty scanning eye. I wouldn't mind having one, so long as it could be programmed not to try and kill me.

Re:mind blowing?

[ScrewMaster]

It would have been a totally different show.

Yes, and arguably a better one.

Re:mind blowing?

[martin-boundary]

Are you kidding? Cylon sympathizers know who they are. They don't think they're humans fighting the good fight against the machines until they find out they aren't. They don't have to make a choice between what they really are and what they always thought they were. It would have been a totally different show.

You're actually describing religious or racial extremists. Imagine some people who thinks they're "chosen people" for most of their life, and then one day discover that there was a mistake and they're actually not. You could build a whole show on that premise, and the issues wouldn't be substantially different.

For example, you could have a show about Jewish people who one day discover that they're actually gentiles, or about a group of Nazi soldiers in WWII who discover that they're actually Jewish, or about a family of white people in Alabama during the fifties who discover one day that they have black ancestors. You get the point.

Re:mind blowing?

[guybrush3pwood]

[...]dry-humping Tricia Helfer (which got tiresome after the second or fifth time).

It most certainly did not! :P

Re:mind blowing?

[Jartan]

This is the kind of comment that deserves to go past 5. I realize a lot of people love the show but at least accept the "human" psylons were an attempt to move AWAY from sci fi and keep production costs down. The fact that it let them add a bunch more drama was just a bonus.

Re:mind blowing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. Yeah. And Boomer was a lot hotter than Number 6 anyway. But even the Baltar/6 tedium was nowhere near as bad as Starbuck and Apollo being all emo over each other that whole last season.

Re:mind blowing?

[Luke has no name]

Also, less allegory would have been had about the torture of faceless, godless enemies, and the realization that they're just the same as us, etc. etc.

It would have been a totally different show, and for the millions who enjoyed the show thoroughly (especially when discounting the ending), it would therefore have been worse.

You get +1 troll.

Re:mind blowing?

[Snowgen]

Ok, let's get one thing straight -- the Cylons "evolving" into human form was not "mind blowing". It just wasn't.

Agreed. it wasn't even new to the Galactica canon. We first see human looking cylons in "The Night the Cyclons Landed" two-parter (aka "the halloween episode" with a special Wolfman Jack appearance) of Galactica 1980.

Re:mind blowing?

[ScrewMaster]

Also, less allegory would have been had about the torture of faceless, godless enemies, and the realization that they're just the same as us, etc. etc.

It would have been a totally different show, and for the millions who enjoyed the show thoroughly (especially when discounting the ending), it would therefore have been worse.

You get +1 troll.

Captain Kirk: "Well, there's no accounting for taste."

I personally did not care for the show, and from my perspective, if it were different there's a possibility I would have watched it. If that makes me a troll in your mind, well, it's a good thing you aren't moderating because you obviously equate Troll with Disagree.

Re:mind blowing?

[mrmeval]

Agreed, when you take all the science out you have a Dallas, Gunsmoke or Firefly.

Re:mind blowing?

[Belial6]

Exactly. They did this in the original BSG also. It was in Galactica 1980. You know, the season that completely sucked. Even the Centurions sucked though. What kind of a moron would build a war machine that had all of it's gears and actuator exposed. The original Cylons were armored. Like a tank. The new Cylons looked like they could be taken down with rock or stick tossed into the gears.

Re:mind blowing?

[Anonymous Coward]

shameless ploy to reduce production costs, and to have a bunch of scenes with James Callis dry-humping Tricia Helfer (which got tiresome after the second or fifth time)

Hi. James Callis here. For the record, that didn't get old.

Re:mind blowing?

[Belial6]

a family of white people in Alabama during the fifties who discover one day that they have black ancestors.

About 10 years ago, I had a friend that had that happen to her. She actually thought she was part Puerto Rican, and at ~25 found out the family secret. I found it pretty funny when it came up. She looked at me and my wife and said "So, it turns out I'm black.". I looked at her, and could only think, "Huh... Not that you mention it, I guess you are."

Re:mind blowing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather off-topic, but I'd like to note that anyone can become a Jew so long as they're serious about joining the religion and culture. If someone lived their whole life as a Jew then they ARE Jews, or at worst they can become Jews very easily by appearing before a rabbinical court.

Re:mind blowing?

[Splab]

Err, perhaps you should actually watch the series?

Whole point of the Cylon attacks is number 6 fucks the brains out of Baltasar in exchange for direct access to the defense main frames - how do you propose to explain unhindred access to a tin box?

Re:mind blowing?

[roc97007]

Agreed. "Oh Apollo, let's talk about our feeeeeeeelingssssss" retch. See, nerds don't see anything wrong with this because they don't have enough socialization to realize that nobody acts like that. They think it's characterization. It's sad, really.

Re:mind blowing?

[roc97007]

I choose not to consider Galactica 1980 as canon, except for one single episode, the last one (I think), the return of Starbuck. But you're right.

Re:mind blowing?

[Luke has no name]

Now I get +1 troll. I wouldn't have modded you down, but I certainly, absolutely disagree with your proposition.

That's like saying, "If Nazi Germany had just loved Jews, it would have been great!". When you take away what defines someone or something, can you really even compare the outcomes by calling them the same thing?

Anywho. I'm clearly drunk right now. If it's not clear.... it is now.

Re:mind blowing?

[TheRaven64]

Remember Baltar in the original series? If they hadn't had human cylons, they'd have had human traitors. These are more interesting, from a storytelling perspective. What did the Cylons offer them that made them betray their own people? You'd have the opportunity to explore the psychology of people who could participate in genocide then go back to their normal lives (analogies for concentration camp guards). Some could have been offered material rewards, such as rule over an enslaved population. Others could be idealists who believed that machines were inherently superior to biological life forms, or who believed in coexistence and refused to admit that the Cylons would actually kill them (we saw this briefly in BSG).

There are lots of possibilities, but they all require careful writing. Just having a secret instruction planted in someone's brain that makes them become a different character when it's convenient for the plot is a cop out.

Re:mind blowing?

[h4rm0ny]

Deciding to make the robots in one's production look like humans is a legitimate cost-cutting measure, I suppose, but don't try to justify it on any other terms. It was just cheap, and really added nothing of value.

Half the plots of the series revolved around whether or not someone was a Cylon and even whether or not that individual knew they were a Cylon. That would have worked a great deal less well if one of the people in the room was a seven foot and made of steel. :)

Besides, the original series' Cylons were impressive machines. They were black and silver, very shiny, and had that nifty scanning eye. I wouldn't mind having one, so long as it could be programmed not to try and kill me.

They actually made an appearance in the new series as an earlier model. They still looked pretty good.

Re:mind blowing?

[speroni]

I wouldn't mind having a Tricia Helfer robot, so long as it was programmed not to try and kill me.

Re:mind blowing?

[TangoMargarine]

Weren't Baltar and maybe Commander Adama the only atheists on the show? And Baltar turned "follower of the one true unnamed Cylon god" after a couple seasons. Different god != no god.

Re:mind blowing?

[roc97007]

The boring half.

Re:mind blowing?

[Markvs]

It was a ploy to reduce production costs when it was done in Galactica: 1980. With CGI that's not really an issue.

Re:mind blowing?

[roc97007]

Look, I understand. TV goes through long dry periods where there's no good scifi to watch. I get it. But we can't be so scared that there won't be anything but Dallas remakes that we're willing to just accept Dallas In Space. We need to have higher standards than that. Bad SF is NOT better than no SF at all.

Everyone stop while the little robot Figgy or Twiggy or whatever the hell he's called makes a comment.

BDBDBDBBDBDBDBDBD.....BDBDBD....BDBD

BDBD

BDBDBD...BDBD.....BDBDBDBD

BDBD

BD

"That's right, Buck."

Re:mind blowing?

[roc97007]

I find it hilarious that even people who enjoyed the show thoroughly thought the ending sucked.

Re:mind blowing?

[Anonymous Coward]

dry-humping Tricia Helfer (which got tiresome after the second or fifth time).

Actually, she was number six.

Re:mind blowing?

[roc97007]

Ok, my knowledge of TV shows is not encyclopedic, but I'm pretty sure Baltasar was a character on Charmed.

But hey, I couldn't bring myself to see seasons 3 and 4 of BSG, maybe Gaius Baltar changed his name at some point.

More to the point, didn't I hear somewhere that Baltar turned out to be a Cylon at the end? What more motivation does he need? Or didn't they ever retcon that?

Unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately all that stopped a little after Season 2, when someone decided gypsy seers went perfectly with robotic space battles. They didn't even TRY to make it sci-fi, it was just straight up sixteen hundreds earth style gyps fortune tellers you might find in France set smack in the middle of an otherwise sci-fi story.

Re:Unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you used to be able to find in France.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[camperdave]

Evolved simply means changed. It doesn't mean "biologically improved by a process of natural selection". A model of car evolves from one year to the next.

Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[Culture20]

I was confused there for a centon.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[plover]

I was confused there for a centon.

You still remember that show? It didn't even last a yarin.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[Anonymous Coward]

The original was vastly superior to this unimaginative remake bullshit. It had a better story, better actors, better music and better cinematography. Even some of the special effects were better.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[ScrewMaster]

I was confused there for a centon.

You still remember that show? It didn't even last a yarin.

Too much feldergarb. Oh frak, where did my mouse pointer go?

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[The End Of Days]

You definitely had better drugs when you were watching it. The old show has more cheese than a Man Vs Food nacho episode.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[ScrewMaster]

The original was vastly superior to this unimaginative remake bullshit. It had a better story, better actors, better music and better cinematography. Even some of the special effects were better.

Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra did the effects for the initial season. So yes, some of those effects were very well done for the time, I agree.

As remakes go, the SyFy Channel's effort just didn't really quite measure up, so far as I'm concerned. They cancelled Stargate in favor of this crap. I know that BSG fans claim it's because BSG was more popular, but I don't believe that. This is also the channel that axed Sliders in favor of First Wave, so I don't trust their judgment. Period.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[ScrewMaster]

You definitely had better drugs when you were watching it. The old show has more cheese than a Man Vs Food nacho episode.

Sure, and therein lies the charm. The remake took itself far too seriously, in the same way that Stargate: Universe takes itself too seriously.

And you're right about the drugs.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[Anonymous Coward]

The original was vastly superior to this unimaginative remake bullshit. It had a better story, better actors, better music and better cinematography. Even some of the special effects were better.

Yes, yes the original was vastly superior. Vastly superior because you were a child when you first saw it. Back when you were still believing in fairy tales, monsters under the bed, and Santa Claus. Back when you still thought girls were icky, felt knock knock jokes were hilarious, and enjoyed making fart noises and eating the boogers you dug out of your nose.

Now that you've grown up somewhat it is to be hoped you might appreciate a more grown up BSG. But clearly some folks have more growing up to do.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[WCLPeter]

It didn't even last a yarin.

Ummm, don't you mean yahren? ;-)

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[WCLPeter]

The remake took itself far too seriously, in the same way that Stargate: Universe takes itself too seriously.

Yes, that is true, but unlike Battlestar: The Remake, Stargate: Universe is actually entertaining.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[sunspot42]

The remake took itself far too seriously

Oh, the original took itself very seriously. Which is what makes it so incredibly hilarious, because it was a steaming pile of crap, even for 1978.

For those who haven't caught the show in 30 years (or ever), the big splashy debut episode - which Universal blew millions on - involves the robotic Cylons launching a sneak attack on the Colonies, after which the ragtag fleet led by the Galactica flees for parts unknown. Literally days later they come across Las Vegas in space and all of the desperate survivors head off for a little gambling and drinking like they'd just stumbled onto the set of the Love Boat or something. Laughable. There's probably a way to handle such a plot development, but Glen Larson sure as hell wasn't capable of doing it. The thing ended up being a cartoon with people.

Actually, that's not entirely fair. Cartoons like Johnny Quest and Spider-Man - made more than a decade earlier - featured far more realistic characters.

I saw the original Galactica again in the mid-'90s for the first time since I was 10, and thought it was one of the stupidest things I'd ever seen. Like a bad episode of Buck Rogers, only filmed in an unlit locker room. Universal may have spent millions, but it didn't show - the sets were no better than Star Trek's had been a decade before.

The only thing it had going for it were ray guns and lots and lots and lots of explosions. And Dirk Benedict, who did the best Han Solo in the world this side of Harrison Ford. The rest of the cast was either totally wooden or ridiculous scenery chewers, although Jane Seymour was a trooper and did what she could with her role, and John Colicos I have to admit chewed scenery very well, even if his character's actions didn't make a lick of sense.

The original Galactica makes Star Trek: Voyager look like Mad Men, and the remake was a massive improvement (but just about anything would be).

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[styrotech]

That leads me to the one line I can remember from reading all those Mad Magazines as a kid:

"All engines ahead one frisbee!"

...some googling later... here it is!

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[plover]

Wow, I bow to your supreme uber-geekiness! All hail WCLPeter! :-)

(And here I thought I was being awful just for remembering the word!)

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[Anonymous Coward]

Grown up? You have got to be kidding. The BSG remake is blatantly made for the teenage, high school kid demographic. Also some of us were adults when the original came out and prefer it over this talentless pap.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[jjohnson]

One of the pleasant surprises was Richard Hatch (Apollo in the original) coming back and doing an excellent job of playing a villain (Tom Zarek) in the new series--and then giving that villain a very deep portrayal that made him one of the most interesting characters in the series.

In comparison, Dirk Benedict whined about he didn't get to come back as a hotshot viper pilot.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[Anonymous Coward]

Literally days later they come across Las Vegas in space and all of the desperate survivors head off for a little gambling and drinking like they'd just stumbled onto the set of the Love Boat or something

It wasn't days later, it was a good amount of time later. Also the reason that they stopped over on that planet was to get more seed because a Cylon attack had wiped out two out of three of their agricultural ships and the third lost its airlock for the biodomes, freezing all of the crops.

I guess you think that anything that isn't dark and emo is ridiculous. I happen to like the interjections of lightheartedness and hope. The original series had characters that felt honest and virtuous. The remake has a bunch of depressed characters that are "too cool for school" and try too hard to look good.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[DavidTC]

How on earth can you complain about a network putting Sliders out of its misery?

I mean, sure great premise and all...but, seriously. The show had been clinically brain-death the entire time it was on sci-fi.

Re:Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica.

[sunspot42]

It wasn't days later, it was a good amount of time later.

It was days. Apollo led a mission to clear out a minefield so the fleet could take a shortcut.

Which of course points to another bit of stupidity in the original Galactica - how did they manage to travel from solar system to solar system in a matter of days (or even weeks or months) without FTL drive? The "science" of the original Galactica was laughable, just like the plot.

Also the reason that they stopped over on that planet was to get more seed

They stopped to get food, because their supplies were contaminated, and especially to get fuel, which they had little of.

And then a bunch of refugees proceed to prance about Las Vegas in space like Love Boat extras, as if nothing had happened. Ludicrous.

I guess you think that anything that isn't dark and emo is ridiculous

Newsflash - if you're going to tell the tale of a bunch of folks fleeing the destruction of their homeworlds, that tale by nature is going to have to be really, really dark, or else it's going to be ridiculous. If you want something "lighthearted", stick to telling stories about puppies and kittens.

The original series had characters that felt honest and virtuous.

The original series had cardboard cut outs who were honest and virtuous because they had no discernible personalities or motivation whatsoever. The proceedings felt about as realistic as a puppet show, and the performances reflected that fact.

None of which should come as a great surprise, since Larson is also the genius responsible for cheezefests like Manimal and Knight Rider. Which are great if you're 10 I suppose, but I can't imagine an adult stupid enough to sit through one of the things - certainly not twice.

Except maybe to laugh AT it.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[Anonymous Coward]

But I don't think "evolved" is applicable in this situation.

Correct - the term they are looking for is "robo-evolved".

Bah

[Dyinobal]

Stargate was better, well up until Stargate Universe that is.

Re:Bah

[ScrewMaster]

Stargate was better, well up until Stargate Universe that is.

Yes, I preferred SG-1 to Atlantis, but I have every episode of both. Conversely, I stopped watching Universe after the first few episodes. I mean, taken on its merits it was a decent, well-produced show, but it wasn't a Stargate series. If you use the word Stargate in your show's title, viewers are going to have certain expectations. Universe, so far as I'm concerned, simply didn't meet them.

Re:Bah

[guybrush3pwood]

SG1 was a silly show, IMO. I challenge you to watch its first chapter now, about 12 years later. You'll be ashamed of yourself, for sure. On the other hand, ten years from now BSG will be as great as it is today.

Re:Bah

[TheRaven64]

The science in Stargate is equally silly. The one thing that they did well was, in SG-1, have Jack look confused and tell Carter to stop talking whenever she starts with the technobabble. Technology so advanced that humans don't understand it seems a lot more plausible than the nonsense explanations that the writers come up with. Unfortunately, in later series and especially in Atlantis they brought back the technobabble.

Re:Bah

[Talderas]

Farscape dealt with technobabble in a good manner as well, usually with lampshading it then subverting it.

*after some alien goes on explaining how some drive works with a bunch of technobabble*
Aeryn: Did you understand any of those words?
John: Well, yeah, I watched all kinds of Star trek, It's just the order I didn't get.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[JWSmythe]

I think it would be appropriate. Each subsequent generation corrected faults found in previous generations, for future generations. More of, favorable traits were maintained, and unfavorable traits were discarded.

    Or the appropriate definitions

evolution

-noun

1. any process of formation or growth; development: the evolution of a language; the evolution of the airplane.

2. a product of such development; something evolved: The exploration of space is the evolution of decades of research. ...

4. a process of gradual, peaceful, progressive change or development, as in social or economic structure or institutions. ...

--Synonyms
1. unfolding, change, progression, metamorphosis.

"The Office" Quote

[bradgoodman]

Beets....Bears....Battlestar Galactica

The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[Anonymous Coward]

I liked BSG because they don't bother with all the techno-babble. How does an FTL drive work? They don't tell you and it doesn't matter. It just makes the spaceship go and uses up some fuel. Quite refreshing from Star Trek and their neutrino flux combobulator matrices and anti-gluon snark fields.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I remember, TNG was set during a Galactic Snark Minimum. Dialogue analysis gave an upper bound of 10^-5 snarkulons.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[ScrewMaster]

I liked BSG because they don't bother with all the techno-babble. How does an FTL drive work? They don't tell you and it doesn't matter. It just makes the spaceship go and uses up some fuel. Quite refreshing from Star Trek and their neutrino flux combobulator matrices and anti-gluon snark fields.

Spoken like a true Joss Whedon fan (and yes, Firefly was one of my favorite TV shows but not for the science, because there wasn't any.)

The problem with your perspective is that if you remove the actual science from a work of science-fiction, at best you have a fantasy. Nothing wrong with that, except that for the minority like me who grew up on books by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, George O. Harrison and other masters of hard sci-fi, well, we tend to resent fantasies falsely represented as science fiction. More to the point, it's the how and the why that makes the story interesting. If the only reason you watched Battlestar Galactica was for the (ahem!) "human" element, you might as well just watch re-runs of Wagon Train, or maybe a good soap opera. BSG (and Stargate, and Atlantis, and hell, Star Wars for that matter) are all fantasies with technological trappings, and the lack of any supporting foundation for all the critical technologies depicted simply detracts from the believability of the storyline, so far as I'm concerned. Complain about Star Trek's technobabble if you wish, but the original series, in particular, was about as much of a true sci-fi as the studio heads would allow: Roddenberry used scripts from some of the best science fiction writers of the time, and much of what they wrote was a legitimate projection of existing scientific knowledge (not all, but they tried.)

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[shugah]

I absolutely hated TNG - not just because of the techno-babble, but because techno-babble became the turning point in too many episodes. Got a problem? Geordi, Data or that irritating little wuss Wesley will propose routing the tachyon emitters through the main deflection shield (or the holodeck grid) that will blah, blah, blah, solve the problem. Make it so. The only thing I really hated about BSG was the word "Frack". I hated it in both the original series and the remade series.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[dbcad7]

What's great about true hard core science fiction, is that sometimes if you wait long enough, what was written about comes to be.. However, fantasy (magic) just is not ever going to have a chance of happening in the real world.. I can enjoy both works, and I like the occasional mix of genre.. Well of Souls series, John Varly's titan.. or Koontz blending science fiction with horror.. The best science fiction does not let the science get in the way of telling a story, but still has a good degree of plausibility.. I still have to let some things go (that are probably impossible) and just try and enjoy what is fiction after all.. So I guess for me "tech-no babble" is one of those things I can forgive, as long as it's not overdone to the point that we may as well be talking magic.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[ScrewMaster]

What's great about true hard core science fiction, is that sometimes if you wait long enough, what was written about comes to be.

Yes, and that's always inspiring. I read a story (damned if I can remember what it was or who wrote it) which described the smartphone in remarkable detail. It was written back in the mid-sixties. I remember being fascinated by the idea, as well as the global computing network the author also described. I was only a kid at the time, but here I am now, forty-odd years later, using that writer's invention every day.

I still have to let some things go (that are probably impossible) and just try and enjoy what is fiction after all.. So I guess for me "tech-no babble" is one of those things I can forgive, as long as it's not overdone to the point that we may as well be talking magic.

Yes, the well-known "gimme". I can usually accept a sci-fi gimme, if it's done early on, isn't belabored to the point where I can't ignore it anymore, and if the rest of the work is at least believable, if not plausible.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[ScrewMaster]

or Koontz blending science fiction with horror.

Yes. I remember Lightning, where the gimme didn't come at the beginning of the novel but towards the middle, when you find out that the Nazis had time travel. At that point, I was so involved with the story and the characters that I really didn't care ... I just accepted it and rolled with it. Actually, now that I think of it, that was an interesting way to handle the believability aspect: don't just shove it down our throats in the first chapter and hope we can swallow it, instead, wait until we're completely hooked and want to believe it. Haven't seen that done too often elsewhere, but I'll be damned if Koontz didn't pull it off perfectly.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[Johnno74]

That is also what was so good about Stargate SG1. It was quite common for a scientist-type character to say to one of the other characters "we found this gizmo on an old abandoned planet. Their technology was way ahead of ours. We have no idea how it works, but you press this button here, and this happens! Isn't that handy!"

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[Stupid McStupidson]

Agreed. I'm not sure where all this 'everything must be explained in minute detail' thing started with scifi. It sucks. Hai guyz, it's not the force, it's just those wacky midochlorians!

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not religious, but AMEN!
Thank f*** that others realise that Star Trek's techno babble was just plain awful.

Also, BSG knew how to portray realistic characters - and believable female characters.

All in all, great story telling.
Loved the way that Dualla left the series ... that was some powerful story writing!!!

AC

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[Sockatume]

Star Trek's technobabble wasn't science fiction. The words they used were tangentally related to science which was tangentally related to the events onscreen, but it may as well have been luminiferous ether for all it was coupled to the plot. Star Trek rarely dealt with issues of science*, it was very much a "space show".

*When it did, it was often excellent

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[master_p]

Please mod parent up.

Technobabble is not bad if it has legitimate reasons to exist. It's only bad if it covers the weaknesses of the script writers. In the Star Trek series, Technobabble got ridiculous in the last seasons of TNG, but largely in Voyager. It is no coincidence that this happened just after Rodenberry died.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Hmmm, it's kind of funny to see you group the original Stargate series into the fantasy-with-no-technobabble category. I just finished watching all 10 seasons of SG-1 for the first time and I was pleasantly surprised by how much science they did put into most of that series (at least, the first 7 seasons). Throughout nearly every episode we have Samantha Carter doing her best to explain the physics being used in terms that can be understood by military grunts like Jack O'neil (and, consequently, the audience). They talked often about the power requirements to drive such technologies as FTL drives and stargates. They integrated astrophysics into many of the single-episode story arcs (time-dilation due to black holes, adding mass to a gas giant to cause it to combust into a star, etc. etc.). Sure, there were a few things they glossed over with things like Asgard and Ancient technology (like how the teleporters worked), but for the most part they tried to explain things using everything from quantum mechanics, to multiverse theory, and even relativity in the original SG-1. The Ascension thing was a bit magical (though, with the implementation of the Ori priors they started talking about ascension simply being related to portions of the human brain being more actively used), but most of the science in that particular science fiction series stood out as refreshingly derived from current theoretical physics models in my opinion.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[DavidTC]

More to the point, it's the how and the why that makes the story interesting.

Maybe for you. Not for 99.9999% of the population. Which means you'll never get TV shows dedicated to explaining the how and why.

Many of us, OTOH, watch science fiction because it's drama with an added bit that can't happen in real life. How would these characters act if they knew the future?

That is science fiction, which is essentially just options added to normal fiction to allow plots that can't normally exist. As is fantasy.

You can get off fantasizing over technical specifications all you want, but that's not even 'fiction'.

The problem with your perspective is that if you remove the actual science from a work of science-fiction, at best you have a fantasy.

Some of us don't give a flying fuck about any perceived difference, so it's not really 'at best'.

Nothing wrong with that, except that for the minority like me who grew up on books by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, George O. Harrison and other masters of hard sci-fi, well, we tend to resent fantasies falsely represented as science fiction.

If you think Heinlein wrote 'hard science', you've been reading some Heinlein books I don't know anything about. I've got a book here where people uses gyroscopes to jump dimensions on the run from, functionally, demons who can rewrite reality. I have another book where there's an inertialess drive powered by sunlight and people are immortal because of two or three generations of selective breeding. Should I go on? And that's just the ones where he explains things.

Or, for that matter, please explain how Rama's propulsion worked? Please point out the hard science in Childhood's End. There was hard science in the 2001 series, but only by humans...the aliens seem to do whatever they wanted.

In fact, your entire attitude is stupid. Science fiction was, from the start, during the golden age, and to this point, about telling 'impossible stories'. The earliest 'sci-fi' didn't even have technology in it, aka, a Connesticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

The idea it's a way to demonstrate future technology is utter nonsense, as is the idea that all sci-fi that isn't doing that is not really 'science fiction'.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[ScrewMaster]

The Ascension thing was a bit magical

That's pretty much what I was thinking about when I wrote that, and I agree, for the most part the Stargate writers did a damn fine job of integrating some real science into the stories.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[ScrewMaster]

In fact, your entire attitude is stupid.

You're entitled to your opinion. I won't sink to calling you "stupid", tempting as it is.

Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation!

[ScrewMaster]

Star Trek's technobabble wasn't science fiction. The words they used were tangentally related to science which was tangentally related to the events onscreen, but it may as well have been luminiferous ether for all it was coupled to the plot. Star Trek rarely dealt with issues of science*, it was very much a "space show".

*When it did, it was often excellent

You might want to give this a read. A lot of what Harry Harrison, D.C. Fontana and the rest of Roddenberry's stable of scriptwriters came up with was more than loosely based upon the scientific consensus of the day. It's an interesting book, in any event.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[DeadDecoy]

Clearly they were intelligently designed.

Galactica really was better

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Battlestar Galactica raised the standard a little for what is "good" science fiction TV.

Like it or hate it, the drama was better than Trek.

One other thing: The entire series only really requires two technologies "granted": jump drive and strong AI. This is good from a viewer-engagement standpoint (again, compared to Trek).

Re:Galactica really was better

[Culture20]

I think Battlestar Galactica raised the standard a little for what is "good" science fiction TV.

Like it or hate it, the drama was better than Trek.

One other thing: The entire series only really requires two technologies "granted": jump drive and strong AI. This is good from a viewer-engagement standpoint (again, compared to Trek).

Artificial gravity, super dense energy storage.

Re:Galactica really was better

[AlterEager]

The entire series only really requires two technologies "granted": jump drive and strong AI.

And artificial gravity.

Re:Galactica really was better

[TheRaven64]

And yet, they lacked related technologies. For example, artificial gravity but no reactionless drive. That was what really made the science in the show feel weird. It was like Star Trek, where they had transporters for 200 years before inventing replicators, in spite of the fact that the way that they describe transporters working makes the replicator an obvious spin-off technology.

This gives me hope

[antifoidulus]

So you mean in the future really hot female asian robots will be feasible? Well I now have reason to live as long as possible.

Re:This gives me hope

[glebovitz]

If I were a hot asian female, I would be totally insulted by your comment, But I'm not, so ... cool where can I get one too.

Re:This gives me hope

[camperdave]

If I were a hot asian female, I would be totally insulted by your comment, But I'm not, so ... cool where can I get one too.

You take a blank robot and download Lucy Liu... or don't you watch science fiction?

Re:This gives me hope

[Anonymous Coward]

So you mean in the future really hot female asian robots will be feasible? Well I now have reason to live as long as possible.

Except the technology that allowed for that was destroyed/abandoned about 150,000 years ago. =P

Re:This gives me hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't date robots!

Re:This gives me hope

[clickclickdrone]

>boyish little elves that you could blindfold with a piece of dental floss.
You say that like it's a bad thing.

Re:This gives me hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Geminoid F [ YouTube link]

Exactly.

[khasim]

Although if you stick to the mythology of the series ... there may not be much difference between the two. Re-watch the final episode if you need it clarified.

Science fiction ...

[gerddie]

The result: BSG was barely science fiction - at least to purists.

I risk to differ: Good science fiction can and should also refer to social sciences by putting people into extreme situations that are probably easier to conceive in a fictional setting then in a setting of the current world. When doing that kind of science fiction it will most likely tell you more about the time when it was created then about a possible future and IMO that is a good thing, because the future is not foreseeable anyway and the fiction should reflect and influence the now. I think BSG did an excellent job at that.

Re:Science fiction ...

[martin-boundary]

Good science fiction can and should also refer to social sciences by putting people into extreme situations that are probably easier to conceive in a fictional setting then in a setting of the current world.

That's just fiction, not science fiction. Real science fiction should have a large science component. That's what it's primarily about. Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties, or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles, etc. Think of it as fiction based on the core principles of the Age of Enlightenment.

Re:Science fiction ...

[s-whs]

The result: BSG was barely science fiction - at least to purists.

I risk to differ: Good science fiction can and should also refer to social sciences by putting people into extreme situations that are probably easier to conceive in a fictional setting then in a setting of the current world. When doing that kind of science fiction it will most likely tell you more about the time when it was created then about a possible future and IMO that is a good thing, because the future is not foreseeable anyway and the fiction should reflect and influence the now. I think BSG did an excellent job at that.

I agree with the one you quoted: The new battlestar Galactica series was interesting in some aspects, but contains huge amounts of melodrama, useless drama, and even soap opera level drama that was completely worthless. Many an episode I used fastforward/skip on xine for the entire episode, then concluded: That was a complete waste of time.

I skipped a lot after season 2, then the last season was a pretty poor and the ending a boring interpretation of making the story fit into the world as we know it. Interesting? Not very. Surprising? Perhaps but not that interesting. It was a bit like Pierre Boulle's story 'planet of the apes', or rather, the film made from the book. The ending of the book is much better than that of the film even though it can be argued they are essentially the same in varies respects. Boulle's ending gives you a shock of leaving a planet, then seeing the same thing they escaped from happened on their own planet, suggesting this is something that will always happen due to human stupidity, whereas the film's ending gives more a regretful ending of 'Oh how stupid we humans are', a 'once' event, that perhaps could have been averted, nothing more...

Re:Science fiction ...

[Junta]

But science fiction (purist definition) refers to posing questions about things that are explicitly raised by advanced science concepts. BSG is good space opera. A story told against an aesthetically interesting backdrop defined in terms of futuristic aspects, but a story that could replace it all with fantasy or even current day elements and still preserve the essence of the story.

Re:Science fiction ...

[Jartan]

You're just explaining what you think is good. That has nothing to do with whether or not something fits the descriptor of "science fiction". The reality is based off what you said you don't like real sci fi. There's no need to feel threatened by that though. We aren't going to revoke your geek card.

Re:Science fiction ...

[ScrewMaster]

Good science fiction can and should also refer to social sciences by putting people into extreme situations that are probably easier to conceive in a fictional setting then in a setting of the current world.

That's just fiction, not science fiction. Real science fiction should have a large science component. That's what it's primarily about. Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties, or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles, etc. Think of it as fiction based on the core principles of the Age of Enlightenment.

And if you are going to create a universe that is technologically and scientifically more advanced than we are (but not so advanced that their technology might as well be supernatural) then you must project their developments in light of current scientific knowledge. That's why it is science fiction and not fantasy.

Re:Science fiction ...

[Culture20]

Good science fiction can and should also refer to social sciences by putting people into extreme situations that are probably easier to conceive in a fictional setting then in a setting of the current world.

That's just fiction, not science fiction. Real science fiction should have a large science component. That's what it's primarily about. Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties, or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles, etc. Think of it as fiction based on the core principles of the Age of Enlightenment.

Someone at syfy is reading your comment and writing a newton/leibniz buddy comedy.
"Don't be derivative!" - gottfried's catchphrase

Re:Science fiction ...

[kaladorn]

Oh, the pain....

That's one of the most witty and singularly painful jokes I've seen in a long, long time.

Re:Science fiction ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. All good science fiction is good fiction first and plausible science second. Contrary to the implication of the story, to "purists" Star Trek is NOT science fiction on either count.

Re:Science fiction ...

[metrix007]

I didn't watch the show, but how is artificial life forms not strictly in the domain of sci-fi? No, golems are not the same.

Re:Science fiction ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good science fiction can and should also refer to social
    sciences by putting people into extreme situations that are probably easier
    to conceive in a fictional setting then in a setting of the current world.

That's just fiction, not science fiction. Real science fiction
should have a large science component.

Sociology is also a science, you know. ;)

You put a group of people in a strange new (futuristic) situation and imagine what might happen to them = science fiction.

Re:Science fiction ...

[cowboy76Spain]

Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties

Then you get McGyver, or something like someone looking at an artifact and saying something like "hey, if we transmodulate the hertz wave in order to modulate with the planck length, we can use this waffle oven as a nuclear missile." Or "we just found this incredible complex alien technology. Let's push bottom almost at randow in order to understand how it works and save ourselves in just a couple of minutes". A technospeak Deus ex machina.

or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles

Every world follows the laws of physics. If you mean a different kind of world à la Pandora, you'll probably end with more Deus ex machina (how did Avatar end?). Also, a lot of the SF does not involve that kind of world (Planet of the Apes, War of the Worlds, and so on).

IMO the best of SF is that it can put the actors in an imagined world that has different rules that ours so the actors are put in new situations, or in old situations from a diffent point of view. As we are talking about BSG, it comes to mind the struggle between the civilian and the military, the black market, the use of suicide bombers against invading forces, the posiblity of use of bacteriological weapons against the cylons. From other venues, I recall fondly how Gulliver could not understand why the king of the giants did not want to use powder against his subjects ("no european prince would have such a trouble") and when Ijon Tichy (Stanislaw Lem) meet several versions of himself by time traveling, but could not agree with himself a plan to repair his ship.

Re:Science fiction ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Each to their own.

What makes a great story to me is believable characters - so I do care about their dialogue and their journey. I'm not so hung up on the explosions (Bruckheimer), or Star Trek (plastic acting and over emphasis on technology).
BSG was all about the characters. If you looked for the explosions, you were in the wrong place. Great for me. Bad for you.

AC

Re:Science fiction ...

[petes_PoV]

Good SF has the reactions of the characters coming from the actions of the science. It means positing a situation (that arose from a discovery or breakthrough) and running it forwards to determine how it will affect the people, or how they will react to it. There was precious little of that in BSG - just a load of pseudo-religious/mystical old tosh that was more influential to the stories than any science (which was used merely as a prop) All we had was basically a soap-opera set in space with robots (that was the only SF part and a pretty weak one, too.The Cylons could easily have been commies and Galactica a knackered old battleship). They couldn't describe the science because they had no interest in it and hadn't actually connected it together. If they had they would have made so many plot holes and inconsistencies that it would have been (even more) laughable rubbish.

For example. Why can't the Cylons speak? We see in Caprica that the little, bitty, household robots can communicate with their masters, so why not the later, more advanced, bigger Cyclon versions, too? You can't explain the science in BSG because you'd go mad trying to rationalise it all and you'd have to assume that your readers were uncritical, credulous idiots who will believe something just because someone from the TV wrote it.

Re:Science fiction ...

[cowboy76Spain]

Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties

That sounds either as:

• McGyver
• The classical technospeak "hey I just found that if we demodulate the gaussian wave in synch with the oscillation rate of Molybdenum-198, then we can use this golf club as a nuclear missile" that just is a Deus ex machina
• The also classical "hey lets push random buttons in this alien artifact we just found so we can understand how it works and use it to save us in just a couple minutes". Another I-do-not-know-how-to-write-an-end-to-this-story artifact.
• You get a series about a bunch of middle aged males who spend months in a proper laboratory, doing experiments and testing theories before getting into conclussions. Realistic, but sounds boring....

or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles,

As we think that all of the worlds/planets obeys the same rules of physics, I'll assume you mean a different planet configuration à la Pandora from Avatar. While it may be interesting and pretty and whatever, the trouble is that it by itself usually just means to the "rabbit from the hat" tricks (how did Avatar end?). Also, lots of SF does not need that (Planet of the Apes, War of the Worlds, just to pcik two examples from movies).

IMO, SF is useful in that, by allowing the author to create the entire universe, he can put the actors in a completely unexplored situation (or in a classic situation, but from a different point of view). If we talk about BSG, I think of the struggle between military dictatorship / civilian dictatorship / democracy in a dire situacion, the black market, the suicide bombers against the occupying cylons, the bacteriological war against cylons...

Another examples that I like are Gulliver's Travels (he offers the secret of powder to the king of giants but it is refused because the king does not want to be a tyrant, Gulliver is left wondering about those strange morals that "no european prince would know about"). And Stanislaw Lem's Ijon Tichy needs someone help to repair his ship and meets some time-copies of himself, but he cannot agree a plan with himself and ends fighting himself.

Re:Science fiction ...

[cowboy76Spain]

Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties

That sounds either as:

• McGyver
• The classical technospeak "hey I just found that if we demodulate the gaussian wave in synch with the oscillation rate of Molybdenum-198, then we can use this golf club as a nuclear missile" that just is a Deus ex machina
• The also classical "hey lets push random buttons in this alien artifact we just found so we can understand how it works and use it to save us in just a couple minutes". Another I-do-not-know-how-to-write-an-end-to-this-story artifact
• You get a series about a bunch of middle aged males who spend months in a proper laboratory, doing experiments and testing theories before getting into conclussions. Realistic, but sounds boring....

or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles,

As we think that all of the worlds/planets obeys the same rules of physics, I'll assume you mean a different planet configuration à la Pandora from Avatar. While it may be interesting and pretty and whatever, the trouble is that it by itself usually just means to the "rabbit from the hat" tricks (how did Avatar end?). Also, lots of SF does not need that (Planet of the Apes, War of the Worlds, just to pick two examples from movies).

IMO, SF is useful in that, by allowing the author to create the entire universe, he can put the actors in a completely unexplored situation (or in a classic situation, but from a different point of view). If we talk about BSG, I think of the struggle between military dictatorship / civilian dictatorship / democracy in a dire situacion, the black market, the suicide bombers against the occupying cylons, the bacteriological war against cylons...

Another examples that I like are Gulliver's Travels (he offers the secret of powder to the king of giants but it is refused because the king does not want to be a tyrant, Gulliver is left wondering about those strange morals that "no european prince would know about"). And Stanislaw Lem's Ijon Tichy needs someone help to repair his ship and meets some time-copies of himself, but he cannot agree a plan with himself and ends fighting himself. -- I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replic

Re:Science fiction ...

[cowboy76Spain]

Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties

That sounds either as:

• McGyver
• The classical technospeak "hey I just found that if we demodulate the gaussian wave in synch with the oscillation rate of Molybdenum-198, then we can use this golf club as a nuclear missile" that just is a Deus ex machina
• The also classical "hey lets push random buttons in this alien artifact we just found so we can understand how it works and use it to save us in just a couple minutes". Another I-do-not-know-how-to-write-an-end-to-this-story artifact
• You get a series about a bunch of middle aged males who spend months in a proper laboratory, doing experiments and testing theories before getting into conclussions. Realistic, but sounds boring....

or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles,

As we think that all of the worlds/planets obeys the same rules of physics, I'll assume you mean a different planet configuration à la Pandora from Avatar. While it may be interesting and pretty and whatever, the trouble is that it by itself usually just means to the "rabbit from the hat" tricks (how did Avatar end?). Also, lots of SF does not need that (Planet of the Apes, War of the Worlds, just to pick two examples from movies).

IMO, SF is useful in that, by allowing the author to create the entire universe, he can put the actors in a completely unexplored situation (or in a classic situation, but from a different point of view). If we talk about BSG, I think of the struggle between military dictatorship / civilian dictatorship / democracy in a dire situacion, the black market, the suicide bombers against the occupying cylons, the bacteriological war against cylons...

Re:Science fiction ...

[h4rm0ny]

A species creating an artificial life form that attempts to replace it isn't "posing questions about things that are explicitly raised by advanced science concepts"?

Re:Science fiction ...

[Junta]

The point of 'space opera' is that it is fiction that has science-y stuff in it. You could've replaced the spaceships with naval ships and cylons with any subjugated group of people and had largely the same show with a different aesthetic. Star Wars, Firefly, and Princess of Mars are examples of Space Opera. This is not meant as a derogatory categorization, just an explanation of what someone who would use 'pure' as a qualifier of science fiction would say about these works. I enjoyed all of them (though BSG had kinda lost me as it came to the end).

'Pure' Sci-fi is fiction intrinsically about issues raised by mankind's mastery and exploration of science. Asimov and Phillip K Dick generally fall more squarely into this category, and Star Trek can fall into this category more frequently than most things that would appear on Sci-Fi. I would say Frankenstein (the book, not any of the movies) would be 'pure' sci-fi that isn't particularly futuristic or steampunk, which is a good example of how sci-fi need not be about the future, space, or otherwise ubiquitous advanced technology, whereas 'space opera' pretty much requires these for the sake of aesthetics and lack of deep contemplation of issues rooted in science.

Re:Science fiction ...

[Junta]

Star Trek frequently was more space opera than science fiction, but they did have a significant amount of content that was science fiction. They beat to death exploring the concept of advanced species interacting with primitive species, the rights, sympathies, and responsibilities inherent in that scenario. They discussed what defines something as being alive versus a thing and how that line blurs with sophisticated AI. It's issues like this that would fairly fall into 'pure' science fiction.

Re:Science fiction ...

[speroni]

I think your signature virus has infected your posting.

Re:Science fiction ...

[metrix007]

I disagree that BSG was not pure scifi as per your definition. The whole point of the show was exploring the issues raised by creating realistic artificial life forms, something strictly in the domain of science, not fantasy. Star Wars is Space Opera, BSG is not.

Re:Science fiction ...

[DavidTC]

IMO the best of SF is that it can put the actors in an imagined world that has different rules that ours so the actors are put in new situations, or in old situations from a diffent point of view.

I think you mean the characters. The actors are, of course, on a soundstage, somewhere they've probably been before. ;)

But, yes, you are correct. That is the entire basis of science fiction, and it has been the entire time.

A lot of 'nerds' enjoy reading about supposed 'realistic' scientific development, and seeing them in fiction, but that is not what makes science fiction be science fiction. One of the first science fiction stories was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a story which had no science at all.

Science fiction is where you change the rules of the world to allow plots that would not be allowed in reality.(1) That's it. That's all there is. There is nothing more, there is nothing less to the definition. Change the rules, see what happens to characters. In fact, now you can have non-human characters, which you can't do much using real world rules.

Some people want to divide 'plausible' and 'implausible' changes between sci-fi and fantasy, and call the entire thing speculative fiction, and that's fine, but there isn't really a huge difference, and frankly the entire concept smacks of elitism, and is stupid, because no one's actually figured out how implausible it is that magic users are hiding in the real world or that we'll invent cold fusion.

Different people like different levels of 'supernatural' and 'future tech' and 'aliens' and 'conspiracies' and 'psychic powers' and 'time travel', but yammering how 'realistic' the change is is total nonsense.

I mean, on SG1, the pyramids are three times as old as they really are, which is sheer, total balderdash. It isn't vaguely 'plausible'. Does that make it fantasy? No, because apparently aliens did it instead of sorcerers so it's...more plausible?

Anyone who starts debating on the difference between sci-fi and fantasy is, themselves, living in a fantasy. Spec fi has two expected sub-genres, one which generally makes the changes using technology, and one generally makes the changes using magic. Anyone who tries to debate that technology isn't 'sciency' enough or that the magic is actually sufficiently advanced science is missing the point they're sub-genres and pretty damn vague to start with, and nothing stops things from using aspects of both.

And we also put counterfactual history in there, which is 'changing a tiny point of history' instead of 'changing the rules', but is basically the same thing. (Which also can overlap with either of the other sub-genres if the change was caused by something instead of just happening.)

1) It is, in fact, possible to change the rules, and then not have any plots you couldn't do in reality. No one seems to do this, though.

Re:Science fiction ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember the black market episode of BSG. Where they decide that they _need_ the black market to properly distribute their scarce resources, rather than centrally planned rationing. Which is just dumb because they were scarce, _non-renewable_ resources and they had the population of a mid-sized municipal government. Yes, it's tragic that some people were sick and dying and that the only way they could get medicine is through the black market, but it didn't make the black market somehow better, it just meant that other sick and dying people wouldn't get medicine because they couldn't pay for it and that the medicine would run out sooner and no fewer people, and possibly more if the centralized rationing was done cautiously. Science fiction does indeed reflect modern sociological problems, but you have to consider the setting. Certainly, for example, vibrant free markets seem to be able to manage things that central planning can't in our world. In the situation the humans of BSG were in, central planning was clearly the way to go. I could certainly see them avoiding shutting down the black markets for fear of being seen as oppressive, but that fear never seemed to stop them from being oppressive every other time. Instead they didn't shut them down because Apollo convinced them it was the right thing to do after he was convinced by who knows what. BSG was an ok show in a number of ways, but the writers really were all over the place and lacked any sort of concrete plan.

Re:Science fiction ...

[martin-boundary]

I disagree with both of you. You can't reduce science fiction to stories in a fantastical setting. All storytelling has rules of course (well, except for a few stories written in the sixties :). Even as far back as Greek mythology, the behaviour of all characters, from Gods to humans, is codified. The Greek world has rules (you could call them mythological physics if you like) which the stories cannot transcend. Yet that is not science fiction.

Science fiction is where you change the rules of the world to allow plots that would not be allowed in reality.(1) That's it. That's all there is.

No. You haven't described anything other than fiction. You can fit any genre to your definition, which is why it does not describe "science fiction".

What matters in science fiction is the scientific rational component, which is essential. It's not about technology per se, but it is about being able to explain the story world without invoking non-scientific elements. That distinction is what separates science fiction from other genres. In fantasy, there is no constraint on invoking non-scientific elements. In mythology, there is no constraint on empirical realism.

Gulliver's travels is in fact science fiction, as is Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee. In both those stories, the plot devices are clearly rational/scientific (according to the popularly known science of the time of course), and explicitly don't invoke religious myths as a plot device. For the reader of the time, those stories are of course fiction, but they are also quite realistic. It is only for us in hindsight that those stories have lost much realism, since we've explored the world and we know that there aren't Liliputians, and we don't have much evidence for King Arthur or a putative Yankee at his court.

For the same reason, Jules Verne's voyage to the moon by shooting a capsule from a cannon is science fiction. The elements are all rationally/scientifically plausible for the readers of the time. Today of course it's quite a bit more ridiculous than it was then.

I mean, on SG1, the pyramids are three times as old as they really are, which is sheer, total balderdash. It isn't vaguely 'plausible'. Does that make it fantasy? No, because apparently aliens did it instead of sorcerers so it's...more plausible?

Think about it. A sorcerer makes use of explicitly nonscientific/irrational forces, whereas an alien, at least in the SG1 type of science fiction, is supposed to use scientific/rational mechanisms instead.

In the first case, the viewer of the show is expected to accept the sorcerer's abilities explicitly as an adjunct to the world, because unfathomable magic forces are certainly an adjunct to the modern secular worldview, just like "real" gods described by religion are an adjunct to the modern view of the universe.

In the second case, the existence of aliens is merely speculation, and the idea that aliens might have scientific knowledge that leads to superhuman abilities is, too. There's no explicit adjoining of extraordinary elements that are anti-rational. It's no different in fact from Gulliver's Liliputians. At the time, it wasn't a huge leap to imagine that among the scores of unexplored islands, there might well be one with tiny but otherwise completely ordinary people.

Re:Science fiction ...

[cowboy76Spain]

LOL... sorry to everyone for the inconvenience, I was posting but it looked like it had done nothing and I thougt there could be an issue with the latest Firefox update.

Re:Science fiction ...

[gerddie]

I don't feel threatened, because I earned my geek card running Gentoo Linux. On top of that, I really like science fiction: for example the Strugatsky brothers and Lem are amongst my favourite readings.

Re:Science fiction ...

[MartinSchou]

That doesn't apply to BSG (or Star Wars for that matter). We don't realise it until the end of BSG, but that show takes place when Homo Sapiens Sapiens is just getting on the scene I believe. Well before any established civilizations at least. Star Wars takes place in another galaxy.

Now, since neither of these shows/movies are related to the future prospects of Earth-based technologies, there is no reason that they should project their technical developments "in light of current scientific knowledge".

Now, that may make them science fantasy instead of science fiction, but that's just nitpicking.

Re:Science fiction ...

[DavidTC]

You haven't described anything other than fiction.

No I haven't. Fiction is set, by default, in the 'real world', with only a few very tiny modifications having to do with the actors and TV shows.

Aka, we implicitly presume that ER does not air in the ER universe, and we presume that George Clooney doesn't exist, or at least doesn't look exactly look Doug Ross. We're also explicitly informed that the hospital and character do exist, and that the stuff happening is real in the universe we're watching. (Various comedies had had fun with breaking these implicit assumptions, like Spaceballs breaking the first and Monty Python and The Holy Grail breaking the second.)

It's almost a tautology. The story is real within the story, and the fictional story does not exist within the story. Those are the basic fictional conceits.

Other than that, other than the very basic premise of fiction, we're seeing 'the real world'. All of history happened, everything is exactly the same.

Speculative fiction is if you change something else. If you changed anything but the requirements of fiction.

It's not about technology per se, but it is about being able to explain the story world without invoking non-scientific elements. That distinction is what separates science fiction from other genres. In fantasy, there is no constraint on invoking non-scientific elements. In mythology, there is no constraint on empirical realism.

'Non-scientific elements' is a null phrase. It is meaningless. Things are not more or less 'science'. Science is a method of figuring out the truth, and if magic exists, it can be interacted with via 'science' if people can see it.

The word you're looking for is, indeed, 'technology', or 'technological'.

In the first case, the viewer of the show is expected to accept the sorcerer's abilities explicitly as an adjunct to the world, because unfathomable magic forces are certainly an adjunct to the modern secular worldview, just like "real" gods described by religion are an adjunct to the modern view of the universe.

It is entirely possible to write stories that treat magic rationally. And it is entirely possible, and in fact 25% of science fiction probably is this, that treat technology with 'magical thinking', with irrationality.

Basically there are three options for the sci-fi/fantasy divide: technology/magic, possible/impossible, or, as you added, rationality/irrationality. None of those actually work.

Technology and magic are just words used to describe 'the change', and any change describable using one can be described using another, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out.

Possible vs impossible, like I said, is balderdash. What is the possibility of a secret conspiracy covering up aliens, and is it more or less likely that one covering up wizards? And don't try to point 'hard science fiction'...just because physics doesn't currently exclude, for example, exotic matter existing to hold open wormholes doesn't make it 'possible'. (And, hilariously, this would dump all counterfactional history into 'sci fi' too.) Physics also doesn't exclude another dimension where elves lives, and when LoTR counts as hard sci fi as Sliders something has gone horribly horribly wrong.

Rationality vs. irrationality is a worldview, like cynical vs. optimistic, and worldviews are very very good things to base genres on. (Look at noir fiction, for example. Or the various *-punk sci fi.) Sadly, that divide doesn't even slightly manage to succeed....almost all modern fantasy books have some level of rationality. Even Harry Potter has all sorts of explanations about how magic works. It certainly reaches 'Star Trek' level of explanation, and usually is somewhat better. Meanwhile, now stuff like Firefly, where they don't explain anything, isn't science fiction!

None of the definitions proposed actually work consistently at separating out works that 'everyone knows' are sci fi or fantasy, much less seem to work for arguable ones.

there is some good stuff on showtime and HBO but w

[Joe The Dragon]

there is some good stuff on showtime and HBO but we need more channels like that for shows not the same movie over and over 100 times a month at a lower cost then HBO.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[BitHive]

Except the root claim is that BSG is somehow more scientifically accurate, which means we are talking about biological evolution, which has nothing to do with the process you describe as "evolution", which is more akin to the kind of "evolution" that takes place in manufacturing.

BSG is no more scientifically plausible than Star Trek, they just use words like "evolution" instead of "warp drive"

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[plover]

But I don't think "evolved" is applicable in this situation.

Correct - the term they are looking for is "robo-evolved".

Nonsense. Robots were created, not evolved!

Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't get me wrong. I drooled over BSG, and it was a welcome change from Star Trek (victory for modernized scifi). But the part where Starbuck dies, then miraculously appears alive, and ends up stumbling over her dead previous body... culminating in her literally vanishing into a puff of smoke -- it made me facepalm IRL. I think some of the original appeal of BSG was what it could have become; the hope that, as you're watching it, all the crap religion and character idiocy will be tossed out in the later episodes. Unfortunately it only got worse. If BSG accomplished one thing, it was in showing a version of humanity even stupider than our own -- surely a remarkable feat.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

If BSG accomplished one thing, it was in showing a version of humanity even stupider than our own -- surely a remarkable feat.

After yesterday, I'm not sure there could ever be a version of humanity stupider than our own.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[gijoel]

I have to agree. BSG started off as a good hard science look at what would happen if the premise of the original series was true. Then around the end of third season it veered off into "God did it" territory.

Which might have worked if they had actually examined what kind of god would kill off two civilizations. (hint: not a nice one). For all its flaws I feel Stargate handles this better. First with the Goaul's sufficiently advanced gods, and then with the Ascended Ancients/Ori, who do actually resemble all powerful beings. At the end they imply that even if you are omnipotent and benevolent that doesn't mean that I should bow down and worship you.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[GiveBenADollar]

You mean you don't know who Starbuck was?! Guess I can understand why you would be pissed off and confused.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[King_TJ]

Yeah.... I'm glad you mentioned that, because that was my "bone to pick" with the whole BSG series too. It was an *excellent* series, all in all - but that religious stuff near the end deflated my interested in it almost immediately!

One of my friends pointed out that the main scriptwriter was a devout Mormon though, so he was probably trying to interject his beliefs into the story-line.

I mean, it's one, valid way to tell the story -- but it just wasn't at all satisfying one for me. I had a similar problem with "The Matrix" sequels, where they went from an initially really cool story-line to some sort of religious thing with Morpheus as a prophet, etc. etc. I know plenty of people who thought The Matrix would have been far better if they didn't bother doing a part 2 or 3....

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[H0p313ss]

If BSG accomplished one thing, it was in showing a version of humanity even stupider than our own -- surely a remarkable feat.

After yesterday, I'm not sure there could ever be a version of humanity stupider than our own.

Perhaps the group that occupy Somalia? They make the Tea Party look like Mensa.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[CAIMLAS]

Wait... what are you saying? Who was Starbuck?

Now I'm supremely confused. I thought she was just another "human" who served an allegorical role in the show. Was she something more?

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[Belial6]

I figured the reason the Stargate was canceled was because the Ori were hitting a little too close to home for someone. It was all fine and dandy when it was Egyptian religion that was being portrayed as a grand ruse, but someone was just not going to stand for Catholics being portrayed that way. The show had been languishing for a couple of seasons, and I could understand if it had been cancelled then, but once the rejiggered the cast, and brought in the Ori, the show actually had purpose again.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[CyprusBlue113]

Yeah, it was amazing to me until the moment when I thought "Ewww, they got religion in my Sci-Fi" and totally ruined it for me, completely.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[floodo1]

wow d00d, never expected anyone to cite Somalia here, but you fucking rule for doing so. Somalia is insanity (done in the 'this is sparta voice'). And people need to be reminded that Somalia is ongoing :(

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[AlterEager]

Perhaps the group that occupy Somalia? They make the Tea Party look like Mensa.

Which group would that be? The Somalis? The Libertarian part? What?

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[EdgeyEdgey]

Please enlighten us. Ta

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it was because the whole "it's the end of everything, it's DOOMSDAY!" storylines are always resorted to when a sci-fi/fantasy series is on its last leg. Why can't authors come up with good ideas instead of resorting to the textbook finale?

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

Which group would that be? The Somalis? The Libertarian part? What?
I see what you did there, you mixed your dailykos talking points w/ slashdot. There are no libertarians in Somalia worth speaking of .The big group in Somalia is the Islamic Courts Union. Do they sound like libertarians? So here's a tip, Rand Paul won, and you're going to have to get used to that fact and moveon.org with your life.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

At the end they imply that even if you are omnipotent and benevolent that doesn't mean that I should bow down and worship you.

Actually you parsed that one a bit wrong. The message was in fact "They may be powerful, but they are NOT omnipotent or benevolent."

Examples: Daniel said after his ascension "Being ascended doesn't make you all knowing". The Orii were wiped out by a bomb built by the Ancients prior to their Ascension - and that bomb was sent to them by the SGC, mere mortals. Adria was defeated by disillusioning her worshippers, thus nullifying the majority of her power. True omnipotence would not be so fickle.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[speroni]

Whats the intersect of people who like Sci-fi and people who appreciate religion? It cant be a big one.

I was very much hoping that the religious aspect was going to be revealed as a physical phenomena and/or cylon manipulation.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole fracking series was filled with religion. You didn't notice this until the Kara incident?!

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing you are implying that Starbuck's reincarnation was an angel. Or a Cylon (this explanation makes no sense). But as the OP I would appreciate some clarification :(.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[GiveBenADollar]

Well, I mostly commented to stir the pot, but it's pretty obvious from the series that Starbuck was 1/2 cylon and possibly capable of cylon resurrection. That would make her father one of the original cylons who recreated resurrection on earth. Sure there are a lot of jumps to make any of it make sense, but that's still a lot more believable than "she was an angel".

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are suggesting that the last scene, the one where Starbuck vanishes, is allegorical? Cylons could have retained an earlier Viper; did they retool the ID number to match her crashed Viper? And the planet where she exploded? Wormhole? And didn't the BSG crew say they could detect no Cylon physiology in her?

I guess the "Starbuck was a Cylon" argument would be more believable to me if we just pretend the writers were having fun with the last episode, or that they were screwing with the viewers.

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[iridium_ionizer]

Glen A. Larson, the creator of the BSG of 1978-1980, was Mormon. That show was highly influenced by Mormon theology (e.g. space lost tribes of Israel, space pioneer trek, space-Satan showing up, space eternal marriage). However, only the most basic concepts of the original show carried over to BSG of 2003-2009. That the new show had religion at all could probably be blamed on Larson, but the shape that the religious concepts took in the new show lays squarely on the shoulders of Ronald D. Moore, who "describes himself as a 'recovering Catholic' and is currently agnostic."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

And as side note, why does Caprica series barely seem to match up with the 2003 BSG backstory. Because it was based on a unrelated sci-fi TV script that was reworked (or perhaps shoe-horned) to fit into the new BSG universe. That little detail seems to have become buried in history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica_(TV_series)#Concept

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my friends pointed out that the main scriptwriter was a devout Mormon though, so he was probably trying to interject his beliefs into the story-line.

You mean Glen Larson, the guy who invented the series back in the seventies?

Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF?

[jwhitener]

I thought I knew, its just her in the past. They flew through the eye of jupiter which bends time, and her dead body is the future, her current body (and now shiny new ship) is the past.

I googled and found a couple more theories (angel, 5th? 7th cylon, or some harbringer of doom involved in some sort of galactic cycle, which I was not too clear about).

Which theory did you subscribe to?

Depressing

[DigiShaman]

The whole series was great and all, but the story also very depressing. Talk about slitting your wrists. Damn.

Re:Depressing

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard a few people say this, but I'm not sure I agree. Yeah, a lot of bad stuff happens to pretty much all the major characters, but they persevere for the most part. Their successes seem more genuine for the struggles. I found the triumph in spite of the tragedies more uplifting than depressing.

I think TVTropes says it best with Earn Your Happy Ending.

Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I figured they looked human to save money on CG. But of course it was more clever than that!

Getting the facts right....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Moore wasn't messing around when it came to getting the "facts" right."

Except for the episode (S2E01, Scattered) where Gaeta "networks" some computer systems of the BSG to do faster jump calculations, and somehow the Cylons can infiltrate what... the cables? Pretty sure if they could do that, they could do much worse to the systems outright.

I always found the episode very lame from a tech perspective.

Re:Getting the facts right....

[RsG]

I always assumed that there were some peripheral systems open to infection (external sensors or communications maybe?) and that the lack of networking simply isolated the inevitable infections until the affected systems could be reset. Press a button, load from ROM, and whatever viruses got spammed at the communications receiver (or whatever) are deleted.

But that does raise the question of why all the systems aren't networked except the vulnerable ones. Is there seriously some reason why they couldn't network the non-vulnerable systems?

Re:Getting the facts right....

[Ash-Fox]

But that does raise the question of why all the systems aren't networked except the vulnerable ones. Is there seriously some reason why they couldn't network the non-vulnerable systems?

They were networked to specific terminals, but the terminals despite being next to each other, never linked together due to the risk of one system being effected could effect all other systems which would be a pain in the ass to deal with.

Re:Getting the facts right....

[TheRaven64]

That wasn't quite what happened. It was that the Cylons were constantly trying to hack their systems. They could get into the communications systems, but that was about it normally. With the system networked, they could also get control of other systems. There was some truly embarrassing science in the bit when they were hacking the firewalls as if they were real walls that you just chipped away at until you were through, but the basic premise was valid.

Re:Getting the facts right....

[h4rm0ny]

That's actually addressed in the episode. Half the computer systems are shut down on the ship because they don't even know which are ones are currently infected. It's akin to having a body frozen until you have the medical technology to deal with its illness. What they're doing by plugging everything back together again is akin to thawing it out..

Re:Getting the facts right....

[Anonymous Coward]

Long cables act as antennas?

Re:Getting the facts right....

[DavidTC]

If only they'd invented KVMs. Saved a bundle building separate consoles.

More seriously, the idea is stupid. If there's that much danger, run each system from non-flashable ROM, where the only thing in memory is the data. It's called 'segmented memory', fools, it's entirely possible to have the processor only be physically able to pull instructions from the ROM. Viruses would have no ability to actually run.

Plus, even magical perfect viruses should be limited to points that actually speak to the outside. Which is why, IIRC, they had analog coms and physical switching. Which is entirely reasonable, and should actually work. (You can hack a PBX. You can't hack an operator moving plugs.) But a virus got in somehow anyway.

But BSG is one of the most 'magical thinking' TV shows I've ever seen. Stuff can apparently 'just happen' if God wants it to.

Not interesting at all

[fermion]

The new BSG was basically a soap opera for the women and a sexy show for the men. It had a dash of pseudo spirituality, and a game where cylons were slowly revealed. The basic premise was slaves trying to destroy the former owners, and former owners feeling guilty about killing the former slaves, but they had no choice. The reason the techno-babble was minimal was because the whole technology thing was irrelevent. The show was purposely designed to not alienate viewers with the science fiction angle.

OTOH, more innovative shows like SG-1 and B5 did manage to use the plot device effectively, explore the broad impact of technology on our civilization, and the stress caused when different cultures mingle. These are real non-trivial problems that we need to explore. Not paranoid delusions that are featured on BSG, like one person getting seduced and destroying a world, or technology, like facebook, being used by kids to plan virtual or real sex parties, or us losing all our material goods to terrorists and having to live like them.

To boot, these other shows, especially B5, did at least attempt to make the physics work. How did the crew of BSG no float around, given that they were in space?

I was ok with the remake of BSG. It was a good story, though not really what I would call useful science fiction. Caprica is crap.

Re:Not interesting at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even watch BSG, or are you just trolling? A great deal of the praise BSG received was specifically for tackling contemporary issues, such as terrorism, racism, sacrifice, democracy, abortion, etc. Sure, you can boil the plot down to "former slaves overthrow former masters" but you can do that with anything: SG was the exact same premise - former slaves (humans) warring with their former masters (goa'uld). If you didn't like it, fine, but it wasn't a 'bad' show for the reasons you chose.

Re:Not interesting at all

[Ksevio]

How did the crew of BSG no float around, given that they were in space?

That does come up in one episode near the end when they find a damaged raptor. They dead pilots are floating and the person investigating radios back that the artificial gravity was broken. Basically that and the jump drives are the only real implausible things with today's technology.

Re:Not interesting at all

[AlterEager]

Basically that and the jump drives are the only real implausible things with today's technology.

And you don't find the Cylons implausible?

Re:Not interesting at all

[Ksevio]

Building a realistic robot seems more in reach than an instant intergalactic transport or modifying gravity.

Re:Not interesting at all

[canajin56]

B5 had artificial gravity. Only the humans out of all the races didn't have it, because the other races didn't share their technology. Well, other than the jumpgates, which, as I recall, they had to buy at great cost. (Similar to how humans bought hyperdrive tech from traders in the Man-Kzin wars).

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[EveLibertine]

I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[ScrewMaster]

But I don't think "evolved" is applicable in this situation.

Correct - the term they are looking for is "robo-evolved".

No, the term "evolve" fits quite nicely. The presumption that the world only applies to living organisms is incorrect.

Nonsense. Robots were created, not evolved!

So? According to some people, all living creatures on this planet were created, but we still evolve. If the robots are sentient and capable of modifying and or improving themselves, then they are capable of evolving as well, regardless of what point in that evolution they were "created." Even if they are not sentient, but capable of altering their own structure in response to external stimuli, they can still evolve. Not Darwinian evolution, or necessarily anything like it, of course. The fact that the process is not arbitrarily governed by environmental constraints is likewise irrelevant.

We're already capable of artificially modifying our genome. We're not particularly good at it yet, but we will be, and when we are, we'll be directly and consciously affecting our own evolutionary processes. No different from Cylons advancing their own design, when you get right down to it.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[RsG]

BSG is no more scientifically plausible than Star Trek, they just use words like "evolution" instead of "warp drive"

I'd put the two series on par with each other, as far as bad biology and misunderstanding evolution go. Recall that Star Trek produced such unscientific crap as "Threshold", that TNG episode where they start devolving into animals and that Enterprise episode with the one species limiting the evolution of the other. BSG was similarly bad about abusing life sciences for fun and profit.

But then again, I'd challenge anyone to name a soft science fiction series that paid any mind to realistic biology, natural selection or any related topics. No seriously, check your list of sci-fi favourites. What you find is either a) they abuse biology in the same manner as BSG/B5/ST/Farscape/etc, or b) they don't touch on the subject at all, thus averting the problem, like SW/Firefly/TSCC/etc.

Biology is the one field of science where the more educated viewers of sci-fi are willing to excuse even the most basic errors, while physics and astronomy are probably the fields where errors are most noticed.

Offtopic, sort of.

[jiteo]

I'm still angry at BSG for ending with "You know all of those cool questions we left unanswered? Yeah, those. Yeah, God did it."

Re:Offtopic, sort of.

[CAIMLAS]

Why do you think they were cool questions to begin with?

They were cool because they were unanswered. The show clearly started with largely theologically guised questions. Everything - everything - in the show centered around the existential, theological, echumenical state of man. It went off in other directions but ultimately the story, characters, and plot came back to it: the "big why".

Re:Offtopic, sort of.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still angry at BSG for ending with "You know all of those cool questions we left unanswered? Yeah, those. Yeah, God did it."

Yeah... umm.... don't start watching Lost.

Re:Offtopic, sort of.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! This made the final episode so bad that it retroactively made all other episodes bad. It is the reason that I will never buy the DVDs at any price. The ending sucked all the fun and interest out of the beginning and middle.

Re:Offtopic, sort of.

[Anonymous Coward]

",,,what does God need with a star ship?.."

Re:Offtopic, sort of.

[stunted]

I hear you brother, as the other poster said it poisoned the back story for me, see my similar post.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1853080&cid=34121402

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[bigstrat2003]

I don't want to live on this planet any more.

Real and credible science?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's artificial gravity, instantaneous travel and Cylon robots who leave no footprints in soft dirt... Yeah, real credible.

Reaction Thrusters...

[CohibaVancouver]

Years later I still recall watching the pilot / mini-series and being impressed with the physics of the vipers - When we saw Starbuck push the viper's stick forward we also saw a reaction thruster fire to push the nose down. It was at that moment that I realized, "Hey, this show could be alright." (...and I was correct, except for the last 10 minutes of the series finale.)

Re:Reaction Thrusters...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean pretty much the whole last episode. *grumbles*

Re:Reaction Thrusters...

[TheRaven64]

When we saw Starbuck push the viper's stick forward we also saw a reaction thruster fire to push the nose down

And the fact that the viper had artificial gravity inside, but was using thrusters to move instead of a gravitic drive?

Re:Reaction Thrusters...

[CohibaVancouver]

And the fact that the viper had artificial gravity inside

Honest question: Did we ever see that vipers had artifical gravity? Did we ever see evidence of something floating around the viper cockpit? I just assumed the viper pilots were strapped in like John Glenn in his tin can? No question that the raptors had gravity though. But, and not too geek out too much, even if the vipers did have gravity, if you wanted to push the nose down, what could the gravity act against?

Re:Reaction Thrusters...

[TheRaven64]

Did we ever see that vipers had artifical gravity? Did we ever see evidence of something floating around the viper cockpit? I

There is one episode which finds a viper with its artificial gravity dead. Beyond that, you can see things dangling from the uniforms always dangle down, even if they have just done a dive.

But, and not too geek out too much, even if the vipers did have gravity, if you wanted to push the nose down, what could the gravity act against?

The rest of the universe. It's one of the interesting things about gravity. They can control gravity to such a degree that you can cause an attraction to the deck plates - not to a point, but a flat gravity field - the technology required to do so is phenomenally complex. Being able to do so means that they could easily create an upwards attraction on the front of the craft and a downwards attraction on the back to rotate it - that would be easier. They could also have a gentle gravity gradient in the hangar bay, which they don't. The hangar bay artificial gravity is, uh, interesting. On approach, it's not affecting you, but as soon as you fly in you're pulled 'down'. A more sensible design would just have you fly through the tube and use the AG to drag your ship to the docking slot; this would make for much faster and safer docking.

There are a huge number of spin off technologies from being able to manipulate gravity, including a large number of military applications. For example, you could build missile countermeasures by firing an AG generator on a projectile and having it drag missiles away from the primary target. With slightly better control, you could push missiles away from the ship or into each other.

That's the real problem with shows like BSG, from a technological perspective. They introduce one magic technology, but don't consider its effect on the rest of the ecosystem. It's like seeing someone with a handheld computer in a setting with 1900s technology - the transistor made such a huge impact on the rest of technology that having it only used in one device is just weird.

Depends...

[Junta]

Trek and bsg represent distinct subgenres of science fiction. Trek more frequently grappled with questions directly related to aspects of change resulting directly from technology. It wasn't as deep on that front as less mainstream material, but they did ponder some questions (how does very advanced technology affect primitive culture interaction, how do you communicate with a species with an entirely difference frame of reference, what happens when transporters inadvertently clone somewone, stuff like that).

BSG is space opera. Spiffy environment, but largely a tale that could be told without the technology. Prime example being the whole New Caprica arc, which conveniently resembled the situation in Iraq. The extraordinary bad-ass rescue mounted by the battlestar's superficially involved advanced tech, but was not deeply tackling many things inherent to coping with advances in science.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[plover]

Whoosh.

Was there still sound in space?

[RNLockwood]

Interesting article. I saw some of the original series and never wanted to see the new one but now I think I will see if it's on somewhere in cable-land. So the writers know the difference between star systems and galaxies but even documentaries have sound in space: Does the new Battlestar Galactica maintain the "standard"?

Re:Was there still sound in space?

[91degrees]

This is the 21st century. The standard has changed. No sound in space, but there is a muted hollow sound of bullets firing from inside the Vipers.

They do have incidental music though, so you may find it unrealistic:P

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[ScrewMaster]

Whoosh.

Yeah well. It's been a long day. I'll go back to my room now.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[LiquidAvatar]

While that is the correct definition of evolution, it does not describe the leap from inorganic to organic cylons. As the show presented it, there was no transformation from inorganic to organic. Instead, a few members of a species of organic machines (the "final five") came across and subjugated the cylons. While it's true that this conquering species did take on the name of the conquered species and they did share their biological tech with the cylons in a limited capacity, there was no evolutionary link between a Cylon Raider and a Number 6. The cylons never evolved to a point where they looked human.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[Korin43]

No, no, no.. It's space-evolved!

It was real when...

[arthurpaliden]

What made it real for me was when I saw the first person running laps throught the companionways. Been there, done that.

Ronald E. Moore?

[juventasone]

I didn't make it past the first few paragraphs. His name is Ronald D. Moore, not E. At one point he worked with a Ronald B. Moore, so the distinction is important.

OK, next paragraph. Star Trek: Voyager? He produced on Voyager for all of two episodes. He produced on Deep Space Nine for 128 episodes. I doubt his visit with Voyager was the major influence.

99% Fi and 1% Sci does not a sci-fi make!

[Spinlock_1977]

99% Fi and 1% Sci does not a sci-fi make. Wake the fuck up sci-fi writers! It's the heretofore unthought-of gizmos, and the unique ways they're used to get out of mind-blowing situations (replete with explosions and such) that makes a sci-fi. The crap you guys have been writing lately (I'm looking at you, SG Universe and Caprica!) got you your commercially-viable mainstream audience, but you alienated (ha ha) us real sci-fi fans. You suck, go away. And hence forth, be known as Fi-Sci writers, correctly leading with the ratio of drivel, to cool.

Re:99% Fi and 1% Sci does not a sci-fi make!

[eriqk]

What you want is pulp and space operas. Nothing wrong with that, but "us real sci-fi fans" haven't seen any "real sci-fi" on tv, ever. Caprica was the only show that came remotely close to having the potential to be "real sci-fi".

Re:99% Fi and 1% Sci does not a sci-fi make!

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife and I watch SGU. I think it is a decent show. She is beginning to hate is for precisely the reasons you outline. Where is the tech? She thinks the show is just always morose, with an ineffectual leader who doesn't even try to get help. Why aren't people taking classes to help learn anything about the ship? Why are there not people on the Com stones all the time so experts can be aboard helping out?
I get what she means, but am willing to forgive. I do hope they advance faster though, I am getting bored with space opera love stories.

My 2 cents

[JasoninKS]

Personally, I liked BSG. I liked that it didn't depend on technobabble. For me, one of the biggest problems in Star Trek is that the tech, all too often, saved the day whether it was to transport this, phaser that, or create some magic energy field. It reminds me of the lyrics from MST3K, don't worry about how they eat and breathe...just relax and accept that it works. The Cylon baseship was organic...what did it eat? Didn't matter. Would knowing things like that really have made the show better? No...it just would've cluttered the show up with useless details that didn't advance the story. That said, I also liked that it was a character based show. They had flaws, they got angry, and sometimes they did dumb things that had consequences. The original? Too happy-go-lucky. There's a few thousand of you left, chased by bad guys, low supplies...and yet you've got time for a casino & roller disco?

Re:My 2 cents

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, some people actually like the "sci" in sci-fi. Sorry if that bothers you but you're an obvious minority here.

writer's strike

[Anonymous Coward]

The writer's strike killed Heroes. The end of that season was basically a complete 180 that totally invalidated every minute of the season up to that point. After that it was never the same.

It did not keep it "credible"

[Anonymous Coward]

It kept it lame and uninspired. FFS on the fuel processing ship there were a bunch of retards poking sand on conveyor belt. This is why I hated that show. there was nothing Sci-Fi about it! Not amazing "Whoa" moments to be had. Nothing so spectacular and confusing that it took me few moments to wrap my head around when I saw it. It just had crap.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[M. Baranczak]

It is evolution, Dave. But... not as we know it.

Mindblowing? More like cliched.

[1u3hr]

"it was more mind-blowing than the writers could have conceived - such as when the humans discover their mechanical Cylon persecutors have evolved to look human."

Give me a break. It's a novelty when so-called sci-fi TV show doesn't have aliens /robots that can (almost) perfectly mimic humans. May have something to do with it being easier to cast human that three-legged Pierson's Puppeteers. Most obviously this was done in Terminator, the original 1984 movie. And the "agent of the enemy that doesn't realise it, was done in The Manchurian Candidate, in 1962. There was absolutely nothing novel in BSG. It was the stories, characters and fan service sexbots that made it popular; not its SF chops. Not saying it was garbage, just that science and "mind blowing" high concepts had little to do with its success.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[JWSmythe]

    It was pretty clearly spelled out, there was a significant period between the Caprica timeline and the BSG timeline. During that period, anything could have happened. Well, obviously we know the two endpoints. Looking for a missing link in an imaginary universe is just silly.

    The evolutionary chain would seem clear. The metal cylons evolved as warriors for their brute strength and combat abilities. The human form cylons evolved as the learned "race", trying to become more like "God", their creator, who was man.

    There were hints of the intermediary steps. Consider the raider that Starbuck flew back to Galactica. That wasn't a metal machine. That was a grown fleshy nasty mess.

    Also consider, the human form is just a machine. It has electromechanical systems that continue it's existence. We are at a primitive stage of understanding how some of these systems work. If the evolution of them was not bound by biological and environmental concerns, but guided with a distinct goal (to be like "God"), and have a target template ready, that evolution would be much different. If humanity put 40 years of nonstop work by the majority of the citizens who were all as knowledgeable as the smartest person ever, evolution would go faster. Unfortunately, our social and political "rules" limit the idea of biological engineering of the human race. If we didn't, imagine what we could have accomplished by now. I doubt humanity will ever see its golden age of biological engineering as far as humanity goes, because we like to believe we are anything more than just a machine with that extra spark that we call life. Economic concerns limit us also. The smartest people in the world aren't working on advancing sciences. They do whatever they can to survive, or sometimes they thrive, but it's rarely in any scientific field. There were more dot com millionaires than there will be scientific millionaires in this century. People go where the money is, because that's what we've made of our culture, and sadly it will continue to limit our futures for a long time.

Am I the only one...?

[zardozap]

I was actually really annoyed that they had the Cylons "evolve" into humanoids. While the old show was just too damn cheesy, a modern day version of humans versus killer (looking) machines in space would be pretty cool. Instead we got Cylons getting all humanoid and emo about god, and a bunch of other crap I could care less about. And using a computer virus to make all the vipers sitting ducks and getting wiped out? Would prefer a good old space battle to shooting fish in a barrel. What ever happened to the good old "pew pew" with frikin' lasers? Also didn't like the "shakey cam" way it was shot. Probably why I gave up on it shortly into the second season, only to watch the final ep, that could be summed up with "meh". ---Yes I know that will annoy a lot of people, but really, it was terrible.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[Cabriel]

I'm sorry. I don't like posting, but here we go, anyway.

Why, exactly, must we be talking about biological evolution? The Replica... I mean Cylons obviously didn't do biological replication (which I'm sure you're trying to point out), but that doesn't mean they, as a species, couldn't evolve. The designs changed over time. Pretty sure that's the very definition of evolving.

You can even see the intelligence of the regular cylons evolving. Well, you can see the end result, anyway. They turned on their malevolent controllers. I'm sorry if that spoiled the show for you, but it's been out for years. Too bad. Now, because there's no biology in the cylon, we can definately say that it happened non-biologically. After all, they don't reproduce biologically, and yet, it's still evolution of a kind.

In short, I don't think the word means what you think it means.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[JWSmythe]

    Oh, I wouldn't argue that BSG, ST, SW, SG or any other acronymized science fiction is scientifically accurate, hinted to by the "fiction" part of it.

    Rather than arguing cylon evolution vs innovation, I had bigger problems with BSG. The first being their FTL "jump". There was one episode towards the end of the new series where they did a jump to destroy something (I can't remember what right now). This was disregarded several other times, including jumping Galactica in the atmosphere, and jumping a raptor out of the interior of Galactica. Well, and right at the end jumping Galactica out of the side of the Cylon ship.

    If the drive changed the velocity of a craft from it's current speed to faster than light (per the FTL acronym), it would destroy the occupants and probably the ship due to the change in velocity (how many G is a 1 second 0 to 671M mph?). I know, suspension of disbelief, inertial dampeners, etc, etc.. But that doesn't explain how a solid object can pass through another solid object (like the side of Galactica, or a planet). So if "FTL" isn't actually acceleration to speed, but stepping into an alternative plane of existence, when the object were to do it, the void left behind would immediately collapse. Think of the air gap left by a lightning bolt, an incomprehensible size larger and more defined (like the size of a ship in the atmosphere). It may as well have been a nuke going off at a couple thousand feet. It wouldn't have been a simple "woomp" and a light breeze on the ground. ... and the use of relatively modern vehicles and other props (funny cut papers aside). It's a culture that evolved completely separately from modern humanity. There's no way in hell it would be anything like that. Shift 100 years either way from today, and that technology would be amazingly advanced or pathetically antiquated. Well, unless you're a big fan of wood spoke wheels and a top speed less than 45 mph.

Who had the job of shark wrangler?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, for all the sharks they kept jumping.

For GOD's SAKE!

[roc97007]

TV Writers! Are you listening to what we're saying here??

Ending

[golden age villain]

If only they had been as careful to craft the ending...

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[loimprevisto]

Might I recommend Titan?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker

Battlestar Galactica is Iliad II, not really SciFi

[mennucc1]

The most important point is readily made in the article: BSG was barely science fiction. You may retell 90% of the plot of BSG without any sci-fi involved. As a mind exercise, try looking at the series, and recast it in ancient Greece. A bunch of Trojans are escaping by sea after Troy destruction. A legend is guiding them to a new land. During the voyage, they are often attacked by a group of Achaeans scouts. Gods intervene (to your taste). BSG is about the clash of two civilizations, and the fate of great men (and women) at the hands of destiny and the Gods. Take away the (very few) tecnological sci-fi, and you are left with Iliad II.

Scifi turned into soap operas.

[miffo.swe]

Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Universe, The (un)Event and Caprica etc are nothing but your everyday soap operas disguised as scifi. Scifi is just the background scenery for endless dribbel of feelings, debates and other crap. I hate those shows as much as i hate Dallas, Emmerdale Farm, Days of our lives or any other mind numbing storyline where things never move forward. These shows also lack any resemblance of self distance or humor. Its like you put 10 tax accountants as writers.

I like shows like Firefly, Lexx, Sanctuary, Stargate Atlantis and Farscape etc where something actually happens with the story. Farscape is an absolute favorite because of its nutty humor and excellent cast.

Sadly the trend is going towards soaps and because of this i only follow Sanctuary nowadays. Everything else i know of gives me the same feeling as watching any other soap, it sucks donkeys balls.

Re:Scifi turned into soap operas.

[JasoninKS]

And yet there are rabid fanboys that would sing praises to the heavens if someone developed a sci-fi show that was only guns, explosions, and a cast member with big boobs.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[Sockatume]

The scientific meaning is the one intended in an article about the science of the show, surely?

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[M8e]

No, no, no.. It's spacevolved!

FIXED THAT FOR YOU!

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[h4rm0ny]

I'd challenge anyone to name a soft science fiction series that paid any mind to realistic biology, natural selection or any related topics.

Doctor Who. While there have been abuses a plenty, there are also many parts where these issues have been correctly addressed. One of my favourite lines from the last series was the Doctor remarking on the ancient race of evolved dinosaurs the Silurians as "actually, they should be called Eocenes. Scientist who discovered them had no idea what he was doing". Or the old Quatermass series with their alien manipulation of primitive apes.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[h4rm0ny]

Is this something that becomes clear in Caprica, because I didn't pick up on that in the series, or if I did, it's forgotten. How were the final five still living amongst the humans for all that time between the last cycle and the new "discovery" of the Cylons?

could he make the drama "real and credible" too?

[Uzik2]

Didn't care about the characters. They didn't act like real people. The background made no sense. It's "pawn stars" writ large.

Paper

[RivenAleem]

I really like the solution they came up with for dealing with "Dog Ear'd" books and that annoying corner curling that happens to all pieces of paper eventually. Simply genius.

Except

[wiredog]

God/Gods were a major part of it from the beginning. It wasn't like it was introduced at the last minute.

I would like to point out that...

[denzacar]

No viruses from the crew infecting the ship (BSG, Voyager).

Voyager's gel packs were not infected by "crew's viruses".
In all cases it was either alien bacteria, (Get the cheese to sickbay.) alien viruses or radiation.
Gel packs being clearly new technology - none of that was surprising.

I will grant that a ship with sophisticated self-repair, artificial intelligence and the ability to communicate is very much like a "living ship". It also won't bleed if you shoot it, nor does it have a spongy mass of brain tissue at the controls.

Voyager doesn't have "a spongy mass of brain tissue at the controls" no more than is your computer actually controlled by a series of hourglasses (made out of silicon AND based on telling time).
Unless you are referring to Janeway, which I would have to object to as well. She really wasn't THAT bad.
She was not Picard, granted, but she really was not that bad either.

What BSG, B5, Farscape and some of the latter additions to Star Wars and Star Trek involve is ships made of living tissue. And that makes no sense whatsoever. It's like the writers somehow got the idea in their heads that flesh can be engineered to extreme levels of durability and regeneration, or without the limitations of conservation of matter and energy. It ties into a fundamental misunderstanding about the capabilities and limitations of evolution and life in general.

You don't like bio-ships/bio-parts being vulnerable "like they should be", you don't like them being super-resistant "because that's impossible" (and here I thought we were discussing SF shows).
Hmm...

I believe that I know what's your problem with all these bio-thingies.
Gynophilia. You really, really, really want to fuck a robot.
Probably because you were molested by a robot as a child.
But don't worry. This is Slashdot. You can tell us.
What did Optimus Prime made you do?

that religious stuff near the end

[wiredog]

All that religious stuff was in the beginning and middle too.

Re:that religious stuff near the end

[MartinSchou]

There's a difference between saying: "Some people believe in one god. Other's believe in many gods. and "There ARE one or more gods, and these are their chosen ones".

Now, in a show like Reaper, going with "God exists> is fine, because without God, the show doesn't exists (without a God there can be no damnation and no Devil for the reaper to work for).
But saying "There IS a God" in what is supposedly a science fiction show is a bit too much.

Saying that there are religious people? Not a problem, especially as they are using this divide (mono- vs polytheistic religion) as a big contention point for the conflict.

Granted, we aren't told if there is ONE god or many (i.e. who, if anyone, is correct), but it's still making the claim that such beings exists, which in my anything but humble opinion is a crock when you're dealing with science fiction.

Psychohistory

[langelgjm]

I always liked Asimov's Foundation series because the queen of the sciences in the future was "psychohistory," an awesome combination of political science, sociology, economics, statistics, etc.

Not the way they approached it...

[Junta]

I would say it isn't fundamentally different than a slave uprising. It's a case of an upended power dynamic with consequences that look much the same.

The points of BSG that could be argued as being almost fiction about science were existential type things with the cylons (particularly the cylons that had thought they were human), but largely all of that went more into mysticism than science oriented, and wasn't at its core much different than finding out your ancestry is rooted in an enemy nation.

Re:Not the way they approached it...

[h4rm0ny]

I would say it isn't fundamentally different than a slave uprising. It's a case of an upended power dynamic with consequences that look much the same.

I'm sorry, but with that degree of reductionism, I think I could render any science fiction novel you care to name as being basically a non-science fiction story. 2001? It's just an isolationist serial killer story. Martian Timeslip? It's just modern day conspiracy theory.

Your argument is saying if you took Contact by Carl Sagan and swapped the aliens for angels, it would be just a religious parable, and therefore isn't sci-fi.

Besides your argument abstracts away far too much and focuses only on those elements that support your argument. What of people not knowing what they are and worrying that at any moment they may act unknowingly for the enemy? What of not knowing the motivation or origins of an enemy that is not your own species? I.e. why do they keep attacking, but not finishing us. How do we deal with finding ourselves not unique, but an identical clone of many others? How do you deal with losing someone and then being put into sustained and close proximity with someone who shares that someone's memories of you? What does it mean when you know that your death just means you'll be re-born in a newly grown body? And all these things flow naturally from the basic sci-fi premise of the Cylons. I reject the idea that you could just substitute Cylons for Spartacus and say look: it's the same thing.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[drinkypoo]

No, the term "evolve" fits quite nicely. The presumption that the world only applies to living organisms is incorrect.

Cylons do all the things that living organisms must do, including reproduce. Apparently they also evolve, and you don't even have to do that to be considered alive. How are they not living organisms again? You're prejudiced against metal.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[drinkypoo]

Biology is responsible for creating the Reavers of Firefly. You put it in the wrong list.

Re:Battlestar Galactica is Iliad II, not really Sc

[LanMan04]

Take away the (very few) tecnological sci-fi, and you are left with Iliad II.

Iliad II: Electric Boogaloo?

Earth = Earth???

[morgauxo]

The Earth they were searching for was Cylon Earth, not our Earth. Starbuck's triple star system is Polaris? Okay... maybe if Cylon Earth and our Earth are relatively close to one another. But the gas giant is Saturn? Are both Earths in the same solar system? I guess... maybe if Cylon Earth is Venus or Mars. It seems strange that the 13th colony inhabiting a once inhabitable Venus or Mars wouldn't have colonized our Earth too. Does this actually mean that the writers meant for Cylon Earth to be our Earth but changed it at the last minute? I wonder what the original ending was then...

Getting rid of the "Trek babble..."

[theBuddman]

The point of the "fiction" in science fiction is a matter of time. The fact that BSG used bullets instead of lasers is based upon the limitations of lasers TODAY. The fact that creating a laser based weapon today is difficult (impossible?) does not mean that it won't be commonplace in the future. If anything, Grazier simply was lacking in imagination.

Regarldess, I doubt in 20 years we will find much technology that was predicted by BSG. For all the "babble" in trek, we certainly see a lot of tech today that mirrors what was on the show years ago.

News for nerds huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody remember how the cylons repeatedly used their super duper computer virus to break the ship? Like its the 1970s again and nobody has a clue how computers/networks and computer viruses work!

BSG was one of the laziest AND most anti-scientific shows out there, point.

Defying Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

It was just excruciatingly, embarrassingly awful. Bad science, irritating and uninteresting characters, deus ex machina, bloopers and inconsistencies... Call it a mercy killing.

Re:Defying Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

-shrug- to each their own.
    I was entertained by it, found the characters interesting and plausible, never noticed any significant bloopers or inconsistencies (but then I wasn't looking for them). As much as I enjoyed BSG, having a bit of sci fi that didn't exploit a military, in any meaningful way, made the show tremendously more interesting to me. What it had was : Multiple religions and a new, fictional mysticism, which served as the motivator to travel our star system. Privatized space exploration with a crew that were scientists first, but also astronauts. Employed less "magical" technology to get story finished. No FTL, no replicators or transporters; it seemed like the producers were actually trying to integrate known science (planet conditions, real physics) into the story, whenever possible. It certainly appeared, to me, to present a much more plausible future than, say, a megaship of armaments, with a strict chain of command, skipping through the universe pursued by blood-crazed robots.
      Don't get me wrong, "War in space" has its place on the entertainment docket, but setting the guns ablaze against a bleakly obvious enemy, once a week, gets pretty damn repetitive, even when just one series is doing it.

Religious texts

[John Bayko]

I figured that in the early days of the colonies, most documents were electronic, but for tradition the first printed works would be religious books, kept in the temples for the public to read. They would have a habit of folding the pages to mark the passages they wanted to remember, so the books were printed with corners cut off to prevent this sacrilege.

The same printing equipment was then used for other documents when the colony was more established, hence the cut corners on everything.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[DavidTC]

A more specific term would be Pharmacology. And it's a lot more reasonable than the other series.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[DavidTC]

I don't know what you're talking about, but FTL is BSG is pretty obviously a 'jump' style, where they teleport directly from place to place. They do not 'move' at any speed, and the process is instantaneous.

They displace things where they arrive, which does destroy things, but is obviously very bad for the ship. (I don't think the displacement is bad per se, but it's a bad idea to have stuff right up against the ship moving at random speeds.)

Likewise, jumping causes some sort of nearby 'wave' when they leave, that's probably something to do with the displacement, which bends objects right next to the ship. (Well, right next to, but far enough away they aren't sheered in half.) This is only right next to ships, and I think the only time we see it is when a raptor jumps out right next to the BSG.

The FTL in BSG was entirely consistent from what I could see, and they introduced most of the rules of it right from the start.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[DavidTC]

They weren't, they didn't have FTL, and it took them that long to arrive.

Which they apparently did exactly on time, because of some pseudo-mystical reason about the cycles of history.

Re:I don't think that word means what you think ..

[RsG]

Yeah, I thought of that.

But it didn't feel like it belonged in the other list either. It wasn't good biology, it wasn't awful biology, it was mildly bad biology.

And it's the only example of biology coming up as a plot device in Firefly, and then only in the movie. Medicine comes up a couple of times with Simon and River, but that's actually handled a lot less badly than medicine normally is in sci-fi. So all Firefly has to show for itself is one mildly bad example of biology, used to explain inexplicable bad guys (who I thought were a lot scarier when we never saw them up close, but maybe that's just me).

Question for you

[agw]

Why are the big space ships like the battlestar burning fuel on their main engines all the time to creep through star systems between FTL jumps? It's not they are going anywhere mid-system anyway. The only way to go anywhere in a timely fashion in the BSG universe is the FTL jump.

Fricken' LAZERS

[w0mprat]

Lasers are defeated by a reflective surface. It was about time sci-fi ditched them.

I'm so glad BSG went with projectile weapons. Projectile weapons are far more effective in a vacuum than an atmosphere and very difficult to shield against.

Oh and 'shields' / 'force fields' too - there is going to be no such thing. Force fields are even less scientifically plausible than FTL drives.

Frack!

[Cassander]

The only thing I really hated about BSG was the word "Frack". I hated it in both the original series and the remade series.

A totally contrived lack of swearing in oh-shit life-or-death situations would have been worse. The writers used "frack" instead of "fuck" so that the actors could swear with realistic emotion without pissing off the FCC. Would you rather they said things like "oh fudge" and "gosh darn it"? Or worse, not express emotion with expletives at all?

Now, I would prefer if they had just went with "fuck", because I think censorship of "naughty" words is one of the stupidest things our society does. But given the real-world puritanical limitations, I though "frack" was actually a pretty clever idea.

P.S. I agree with your point about too much technobabble on TNG. I have said before that since so many problems are solved by rigging the main deflector dish to fire an inverse tachyon pulse that there should just be a button for it on the captain's chair.

Science??

[scurvyj]

Are you kidding me? They can make artificially intelligent and accidentally sentient machines that are capable of self evolution, and have working warp drives, force fields and instantaneous long distance comms. Yet...... nobody is uploaded, everyone has a 20th century lifespan, victims die of cancer, and religion is a disease threaded through their whole society.

There is NO science in BSG, but I still love it :) It's pure space opera, and technologically its even sillier than Star Wars. But as space opera goes both are excellent (if you only count the 2 Star Wars films of course, ahem, pity they never made a 3rd or any more, ahem) and very watchable. Excellent characters and good acting!

And would people PLEASE stop mentioning utter pieces of crap like Stargate, they are just RUBBISH. BSG stood out because it was a cut above. And yes I watched Terminator TSCC because I was trainwreck fascinated by it like everybody else :) It was TERRIBLE, but some of the threads were interesting enough to keep me watching. But it wasn't a patch on BSG. Caprica was a mistake we must all strive to forget. Waiting for next Breaking Bad desperately, and less desperately but urgently for Dexter. For good space opera I wonder if they will come up with another BSG quality show? And dare I ask for a good hard-SF series from america? Last thing I saw was by the brits, but as far as action drama goes the yanks are miles ahead!

BSG requires...

[Anonymous Coward]

A high amount of 'suspension of disbelief', if one knows anything about how computers actually work.

He didn't really do a great job.

Running a network cable between two computers does not make them magically hackable...