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06 October 2006
Battlestar Galactica→[More:]
The Lost writers could learn a few things from the Battlestar folks on how to start a season.
What's with all the Lost hatin' lately? I loved the 3rd season premiere, and am sitting here tapping my foot for BSG to hit Usenet come on. Sure Lost raises more questions than it answers, but I'm still enjoying the ride. Why can't we ride BOTH merry-go-rounds??
I am not sure what the deal with Starbuck and the Cylon are. I don't even remember that from last season. I should have watched the repeats leading up to the new show.
Yeah, the Iraq parallels couldn't have been more obvious. I will probably hang out in the newsgroups a bit just to see how right-leaning BSG fans react.
It was a great episode. My problem with the show stem from this: Why aren't the Cylons a little less like us?
The very thing that would give them great power is a lack of emotion. Their very alieness would be the result of them evolving a culture totally unlike ours, with motives that would seem incomprehensible to humans.
I think the writers wanted to add a mystical edge to the story and avoid comparisons to The Borg.
But imagine going against creatures (of our own making and in our own image!) that would be utterly ruthless, efficient and vastly more intelligent than us.
As someone who only remembers the original 70's show and avoids any sci-fi apart from Star Wars (and even then, only 4,5 and 6 are worth watching), is it actually really good or is it just for sad, lonely trekie-type people?
Sush about Lost - season 2 only finished in the UK a couple of weeks ago, so there's no chance of season 3 before next year.
As someone who only remembers the original 70's show and avoids any sci-fi apart from Star Wars (and even then, only 4,5 and 6 are worth watching), is it actually really good or is it just for sad, lonely trekie-type people?
The old one was a cheesy goofball show. This is a well-written serious drama. It is a very dark show and a good portion of the episodes keep you on the edge of your seat the entire time. There are not new aliens popping up every week, it is just the human survivors and the Cylons.
Ah, it sounds good. Now all I need is the ability to watch it. In the UK it's only on non-terristrial TV, which means either: getting a Sky subscription (and I refuse to give money to Murdoch), a Freeview box (not available in my area yet) or cable (there's one provider, I used them once, and never again).
So, it looks like Bit Torrent, which I've never used before. Anyone got a n00bs guide for a Mac user?
Yeah, he was the Doc. I'm a bit unclear on the other blonde, though. Was she the reporter? Or not? And had she been previously revealed to be a Cylon?
And so the pro-human Six is the pre-nuke Caprica Six? Is it significant that that the mental Six appeared to Baltar just after CapSix was shot?
Reading the TVWoP forums last night, I noticed at least one viewer who I'm assuming is righwing who exasperatedly claimed that the analogy is to the Nazi occupation of Poland, not Iraq. Which annoyed me.
There's a lot of things which make the analogy seem to be Cylon as the US and the Humans as the Iraqis. First, the occupation was supposedly "humanitarian". In the Cylons' case, it's a religious war. In the Americans', it's "spreading democracy". Of course, that rationale is really only true for the neocons—the realists who really decide policy, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, have other motives. Anyway, it's an occupying military that claims to be benign. But they detain people willy-nilly and indefinitely, they torture people, and they co-op natives to do much of the dirty work. The natives respond with an insurgency including suicide bombings. So all that is very allusary to the Iraq war.
On the other hand, the US hasn't had an official policy of arresting troublemakers and summarily executing them. This is the "out", I think, for the rightwingers who will claim this isn't an analogy to the Iraq war. But aside from the fact that I think the writers and producers want to keep this ambiguous, I think this plot development exists mostly because it's in character for the Cylons even if it messes up the Iraq war analogy.
Anyway, I think RM doesn't want an exact analogy but probably wants something more ambiguous so the message can be more general. Even so, I hope this challenges some viewers' conceptions about the Iraq war.
Very dark, quite violent, like when Kara stabs the Cylon, then just keeps stabbing him. And very, very political.
It's quite telling when the only real political discourse (in the US) is faux-news show, a sci-fi show and 2 comicbooks (Ultimates and Civil War, natch).