buzzard said:
It's funny. You said you read his critique, but you must have glossed over it. His point was that choosing somone who is demonstrably questionable to make a crucial device and then not testing it is dumb. In fact any example of them trusting Balthus is dumb because he exhibits plenty of evidence of his choo choo having gone round the bend. You may not want to recognize sub optimal decisions, but other people defending BSG in this thread do. If you think I'm going to watch episodes of a show I don't like to make you happy by finding specific examples, don't hold your breath.
In other words, they used sub-optimal contracting methods for acquiring military hardware. Given, of course, that they don't have any real alternatives, and that Gaius
already had a reputation as a quirky, but brilliant mind, the fact that they aren't checking up on him on a regular basis isn't that surprising. Especially since the bulk of his oddities take place
otu of sight of the other characters, and those that do were scattered among a collection of characters. You, the audience member, see Gaius' wierdness every time, but each character sees him acting oddly once, or maybe twice. And then he mostly just looks distracted, like a lot of other characters (many of whom are having trouble dealing with the fact that billions upon billions of people, including most of their friends and families, were killed within the last few weeks). And, to be quite frank, they point out, over and over again, that they have little choice, because Baltar is, in their current situation, effectively irreplaceable.
You have plenty of evidence that his "choo choo has gone around the bedn", but most of the characters in the show don't. And, of course, it becomes apparent during the course of the show that it is
not certain his "choo choo has gone around the bend", because he might be having actual visions of Six that are real, and not just delusions.
While there are story elements present in season one which are interesting, the bad acting, bad dialog, and bad special effects are pretty show stopping for me. In no objective sense do I accept that B5 season one was good.
Then you are missing out on some good stuff. Sure,
Infection is a bad episode (as are
all the "monster" episodes in the show, no matter the season, case in point is
Grey 17 Is Missing. a later season episode), and a couple others are weak too, but things like
Signs and Portents,
Babylon Squared, and numerous other episodes are really quite good, especially given how they foreshadow later events, and set the stage. As for the acting, since the only change in cast was basically, Michael O'Hare for Bruce Boxleitner, you are essentially saying that a single actor in an ensemble piece is a huge problem. Or maybe you are saying that the rest of the cast was somehow different in their acting (perhaps they all went to acting school between seasons one and two?), which I find to be a ludicrous assertion.
(And by the way, the special effects in Season One are the same as in the other seasons. Your citing them as being a big problem for you doesn't really reinforce your argument).
So now, you admit that they make mistakes (er, maybe sub optimal decisions?). Are you debating me or yourself?
Of course one difficulty I have with the series, is I didn't really like ANY of the characters. As such I'm not going to waste my time finding out what happens to them.
No one ever said they made great decisions every time. Protagonists who make the right decisions every time make for boring stories (kind of like Johnny Ringo's books), but their decisions make sense from the perspective of the characters and aren't just some sort of
deus ex machina tossed out by the writers to make the humans lose. And, of course, the humans aren't the only ones who make mistakes. The cylons seem to screw up too.
Of course, you didn't like them because they made "dumb decisions", which makes your argument a little circular. And odd, since you can't actually remember them doing anything that was supposedly dumb.
