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The Science of Battlestar Galactica

Posted by samzenpus on from the set-phasers-on-unrealistic dept.

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.'"

32 of 465 comments (clear)

  1. Doesn't matter what he did by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    2. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by QuantumBeep · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    3. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by plover · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      John
    5. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by RsG · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
    6. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by AdmiralXyz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
    8. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by NoSig · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    10. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by visualight · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Farscape and Firefly

      --
      Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
    11. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by roc97007 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    12. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by Rakishi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    13. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by Ihmhi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
    14. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by Rakishi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    15. Re:Doesn't matter what he did by WCLPeter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. I don't like syence fyction any more by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    it's just not the same

  3. mind blowing? by roc97007 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    1. Re:mind blowing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  4. Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica. by Culture20 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I was confused there for a centon.

  5. Re:I don't think that word means what you think .. by JWSmythe · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
  6. The beauty was in a lack of explanation! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation! by ScrewMaster · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.)

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  7. Re:I don't think that word means what you think .. by DeadDecoy · · Score: 3, Funny

    Clearly they were intelligently designed.

  8. This gives me hope by antifoidulus · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    Monstar L
    1. Re:This gives me hope by camperdave · · Score: 4, Informative

      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?

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  9. Science fiction ... by gerddie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Science fiction ... by Culture20 · · Score: 4, Funny

      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

  10. Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF? by GiveBenADollar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You mean you don't know who Starbuck was?! Guess I can understand why you would be pissed off and confused.

    2. Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF? by King_TJ · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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....

  11. Offtopic, sort of. by jiteo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."