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I'll watch it when it hits Sci-Fi, but I won't make a special effort otherwise.
I'm glad to see positive reviews here on Hatrack, where I know the BSG fans have a discerning eye for quality. It gives me hope for what I though was a questionable idea.
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That... sounds like a terrible idea. I mean, counting "The Plan", the current BSG hasn't even finished yet.
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And maybe after that Bryan Singer can reboot the Superman franchise. Heaven knows it needs it after that terrible movie that came out a few years back. Oh, wait. . . .
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Whoa, a reimagining already? Have any of the main cast died or even gotten mildly ill since the last season ended yet? Not only is the body not cold, it's not even a corpse yet!
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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I just finished the series. I'm sorry I missed discussing it with all of you, but I kept this window up and read through as I advanced through the final season. It was awesome to speculate with everyone...
I stopped watching for a few years at the beginning of season 3. I finally pushed through some annoying days on New Caprica and it was worth it. One of the best series I have ever seen. I'm not just saying - "Oh, that was quality telivision" - I'm saying that it had a profound impact on me and I'm glad I watched it.
Posts: 1604 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I'm watching it all over again after having bought the DVDs. I just finished Season 3. You know, watching it all in a rush, back to back to back, I think you actually miss some of the tension and what not that you got from having to wait week to week. On the other hand, some stuff is really easy to pick up on when you don't have to wait multiple years between events.
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I had the option of watching it all in a rush, but I never did. The show is entertaining, sure, but it is also supremely stressful. I had to take many breaks along the way bc I was in pain many times.
Posts: 1604 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote: I had to take many breaks along the way bc I was in pain many times.
In pain from watching the series or unrelated reason?
It definitely is a stressful series. I wouldn't consider myself "in pain" ever, but between seasons we'd wait a week for new DVDs to come into the library, and the week was helpful to relax a bit before hunkering down for another marathon.
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From watching the series. After many deaths, or disappointed choices by some of my favorite characters...
I have a real life and it can be stressful as well, and when i sit down to watch tv, it is sometimes as an escape. But BSG is NOT an escape, it's written so well that I basically feel like I lived those characters choices and struggles and so there were many times that it was difficult to keep watching.
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What did really frustrate me about the show was that for the last season and a half, I basically didn't like any of the main characters anymore. I didn't necessarily HATE any of them, but none of them had any of the heroic greatness that made me love them in the beginning. And in many cases "has random creepy dreams and becomes a prophet" was used in place of character development. Often in ways that I found particularly unimaginative.
I'm not inherently opposed to the show ultimately being one where God exists and works in mysterious ways. But if so, I'd rather it be treated like the show Kings, which is actually in a lot of ways a very similar show... except it's established very early on that God exists. The rules behind him are mysterious, but in a vague "we're not going to pin down exactly how he works because hey, he's God" sort of way rather than "here's a sci-fi mystery which will eventually be resolved via deus ex machina" sort of way.
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He was a fun character and I think I liked him the most at the end by virtue of his character actually got BETTER instead of everyone else who got worse, but still not a hero I really rooted for.
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: What did really frustrate me about the show was that for the last season and a half, I basically didn't like any of the main characters anymore. I didn't necessarily HATE any of them, but none of them had any of the heroic greatness that made me love them in the beginning. And in many cases "has random creepy dreams and becomes a prophet" was used in place of character development. Often in ways that I found particularly unimaginative.
I'm not inherently opposed to the show ultimately being one where God exists and works in mysterious ways. But if so, I'd rather it be treated like the show Kings, which is actually in a lot of ways a very similar show... except it's established very early on that God exists. The rules behind him are mysterious, but in a vague "we're not going to pin down exactly how he works because hey, he's God" sort of way rather than "here's a sci-fi mystery which will eventually be resolved via deus ex machina" sort of way.
I don't know if that really counts as a deus ex machina. We knew from very early on that something supernatural was afoot, and that destiny and higher powers played a serious role in the series, and we knew from the end of the third season that Kara Thrace was going to play a pretty serious role in that journey. And I think we knew from the end of the third season, especially in hindsight of course, that our Earth existed, and we'd eventually get there.
All the pieces were there. We didn't put them together, but I think they make perfect sense and are perfectly in keeping with how the show ran to the point where you can't REALLY say "woah that came out of left field." What you can say was "woah that was unexpected."
I think some people are at the point where they expect television to be a binary state of evil. Either a show is totally guessable, and that's bad because it's too transparent, or a show is too unpredictable, and that's bad because it seems inexplicable. Is it really that surprising that BSG would have a surprise ending? The whole show was a huge series of twists and turns.
The characters are another matter I guess, more of a "to each his own" sort of thing. The show ended with plenty of characters that I still really loved. It only was ever going to get progressively darker, but there were enough bright spots for me to like my favorite characters still at the end. Plenty of characters changed in pretty negative ways that I didn't like from a "but I loved that guy!" perspective, but they got a lot more interesting, like Gaeta.
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quote:we knew from the end of the third season that Kara Thrace was going to play a pretty serious role in that journey
As I said, the last season and a half-ish (which means starting from middle of Season 3 was when I was particularly annoyed).
quote:Is it really that surprising that BSG would have a surprise ending? The whole show was a huge series of twists and turns.
That wasn't surprising at all. What as surprising is that the surprise ending made no sense. For a show that was built upon extreme political drama, and ending where hundreds of sick, old, and handicapped people suddenly all decide to give up the technology that was keeping them alive was incredibly unrealistic. Let alone the thousands of other people giving up the technology that was providing comfort and a decent standard of living. Not everyone knows how to build a log cabin or hunt or farm. Or would want to.
I'd have bought that ending if the Galactica crash landed on Earth, without the ability to contact the fleet, and the change was brought about by necessity rather than choice.
I actually did like the final scene with Starbuck playing the musical song. My issue wasn't that divine manipulation was used, it was that it took over her character development for the previous season almost completely.
The main thing is that I absolutely hated hated HATED Baltar and imaginary-Six from the very beginning, they never got better, and THEY were the mechanism through which most of the divine intervention occurred. Why is God representing himself with a slutty temptress who never seems to actually give that great advice, why is He choosing this jerk as His prophet? I think it's okay for a show to have a genuinely pathetic character, but a) Baltar kept demonstrating, just often enough, that he wasn't ALWAYS pathetic it was really frustrating to see him stay that way. In the end he rescues a baby by being in the right place at the right time... but given the lengths God had to go to to get him there, and the fact that God was also manipulating other people to the same spot and they only missed the baby because Baltar got there... WTF? Serious God, what's wrong with you?
There also weren't enough episodes of Baltar demonstrating actual prowess at science. I only remember one episode where he demonstrates actual useful knowledge (something about the way explosions interact with water) where he wasn't lying through his teeth, and maybe two episodes where we saw him credibly being a good enough politician to get elected. If he's as weasely as the rest of the show makes him look, why would anyone ever trust him with anything ever?
So I guess when I saw "I have a problem with divine intervention" I really mean "I have a problem with the single worst character being the lynchpin of the entire show."
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quote:Originally posted by umberhulk: Yeah, but Lost's ending didnt come out of left field either.
I stopped watching LOST in the middle of Season 3. My patience ran out. I'm told that people who kept at it were rewarded with a pretty sweet last season, and I'll get to it eventually, but they took way too long to get to the point with absolutely nothing happening in the middle.
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quote:we knew from the end of the third season that Kara Thrace was going to play a pretty serious role in that journey
As I said, the last season and a half-ish (which means starting from middle of Season 3 was when I was particularly annoyed).
quote:Is it really that surprising that BSG would have a surprise ending? The whole show was a huge series of twists and turns.
That wasn't surprising at all. What as surprising is that the surprise ending made no sense. For a show that was built upon extreme political drama, and ending where hundreds of sick, old, and handicapped people suddenly all decide to give up the technology that was keeping them alive was incredibly unrealistic. Let alone the thousands of other people giving up the technology that was providing comfort and a decent standard of living. Not everyone knows how to build a log cabin or hunt or farm. Or would want to.
I'd have bought that ending if the Galactica crash landed on Earth, without the ability to contact the fleet, and the change was brought about by necessity rather than choice.
I actually did like the final scene with Starbuck playing the musical song. My issue wasn't that divine manipulation was used, it was that it took over her character development for the previous season almost completely.
The main thing is that I absolutely hated hated HATED Baltar and imaginary-Six from the very beginning, they never got better, and THEY were the mechanism through which most of the divine intervention occurred. Why is God representing himself with a slutty temptress who never seems to actually give that great advice, why is He choosing this jerk as His prophet? I think it's okay for a show to have a genuinely pathetic character, but a) Baltar kept demonstrating, just often enough, that he wasn't ALWAYS pathetic it was really frustrating to see him stay that way. In the end he rescues a baby by being in the right place at the right time... but given the lengths God had to go to to get him there, and the fact that God was also manipulating other people to the same spot and they only missed the baby because Baltar got there... WTF? Serious God, what's wrong with you?
There also weren't enough episodes of Baltar demonstrating actual prowess at science. I only remember one episode where he demonstrates actual useful knowledge (something about the way explosions interact with water) where he wasn't lying through his teeth, and maybe two episodes where we saw him credibly being a good enough politician to get elected. If he's as weasely as the rest of the show makes him look, why would anyone ever trust him with anything ever?
So I guess when I saw "I have a problem with divine intervention" I really mean "I have a problem with the single worst character being the lynchpin of the entire show."
Oh, well fair enough if you hated Baltar, I guess. I always rather enjoyed him.
And I think Baltar was the best choice of them for a variety of reasons, though, obviously Baltar wasn't the ONLY one that "God" spoke to and through. He was speaking to Caprica Six the whole time, and he gave visions to a number of people, from Sharon Agathon to the most important, Laura Roslin. Baltar wasn't the only game in town. And I suppose it would have been easiest for God to descend from on high to Adama and said "Hey, buddy, um, earth is that way. Mush!" But that would have lacked quite a bit of prose.
In the grand scheme of things, it was really about Baltar's transformation from complete skeptic and cynic to true believer, and that was a pretty long, arduous journey. He needed to be the right guy, at the right place, at the right time to give the speech he gave in the CIC, not just standing where he stood to intercept Hera.
But in general I quite enjoyed Baltar. While most of the characters on BSG are pretty unlike most other characters I've ever encountered, Baltar is even more different. He's not evil, per se, but he does such horrible things out of an overdeveloped love of self, and out of blind desperate self-preservation. And he does tons of pretty brilliant things, from charting their course to earth, to creating the Cylon detector, to curing Roslin. He doesn't do a lot of brilliant things toward the end, but he's not really wearing his "scientist" hat at that point. I think he's fascinating and unpredictable, and his various crises of faith and desire to ultimately belong somewhere make him interesting to watch.
And is it really surprising that a people that had been wiped out and systematically hunted across the galaxy for their overuse of technology would choose to give up that technology for a simpler way of life? Plot-wise, it was absolutely necessary. The whole point of "this has happened before and will happen again" is that humanity was going through a hard reboot of the system, and they had to go back to factory spec. They couldn't keep technology and hold on to everything or the cycle would be incomplete. But on a different level, I can totally see why they'd want to return to a far more basic lifestyle, and there's plenty of aspects of that in our own culture of people wanting to escape or reject technology for a simpler lifestyle. It's not exactly a foreign concept.
If you didn't care for it, then you know, to each his own, no biggie. But the things you specifically have a problem with don't really seem like major problems to me. I don't think it's perfect, and I DO sincerely wish they had made the whole thing a little more Babylon 5-like as far as planning ahead goes, and from time to time things that happened were a little out of left field, but taken as a whole I see a larger pattern, and I didn't really have a big problem with it.
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quote: I quite enjoyed Baltar. While most of the characters on BSG are pretty unlike most other characters I've ever encountered, Baltar is even more different. He's not evil, per se, but he does such horrible things out of an overdeveloped love of self, and out of blind desperate self-preservation. And he does tons of pretty brilliant things.... I think he's fascinating and unpredictable, and his various crises of faith and desire to ultimately belong somewhere make him interesting to watch.
I think it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that Baltar is a representation of many aspects of humanity. Maybe I shouldn't be assigning allegorical implications to the show that may not have been intended by the creators of the series, but Lyrhawn's description of Baltar resonated as a rather poetic description of some of the baser impulses of humanity as a whole.
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