BattleStar Galactica:Season 3.5--3/25/07--Arc 20 (Season Conclusion)

[Kobold Avenger]

Another thing about where the series is going, it's been stated that they're just starting Act 3. I believe that Ron Moore said they got 2 chapters to go, but they haven't decided how many episodes there are to go.

 

[Volaran]

IIRC 'Boomer' said eight not "Five". I don't have time to watch the DVD right now to confirm that but I might do that tonight.

Ah, fair enough. If so then faulty memory on my part. After all, I'm only cy...human.

Edit: Confirmed at the Battlestar wiki. It was eight, not five.

 

[Sir Brennen]

I'm trying to reconcile the fact that the cylons were created by humans, and there was a war only 40 years ago with them, in which there were no humanform cylons with the "final five" somehow seeming to be millennia old...

I think Tyrol, Tighe, Anders and Tory are all descendants of an older group of cylon-human hybrids from a previous cycle of cylon creation [...]

"This has happened before and will happen again."

You might have your answer right there.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Abigail Nussbaum comes close to my feeling on this.

This season feels like it is descending into the same level as 24 and Lost. Where the show comes close to surrealism and fans know it just isn't supposed to make sense anymore. Worldbuilding is pratically a mess of incoherence half-completed ideas. I mean, I don't know what cylons are anymore. My affection for this series has been slowly waning this entire season. Like Abigail, this episode broke me as well.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Some hints that both Tyrol and Anders were cylons, was that both of them recovered quickly from injuries. Tyrol recovered after being spaced for a few seconds, long before Cally did. Anders recovered easily from a broken arm within two weeks after falling off a viper, they also implied he was also perhaps the best pyramid player out of a team that otherwise sucked.

Nah. That's equivocal.

Tyrol got out of treatment a bit faster, true. But Anders did not break his arm when falling off the viper - it was his leg at the beginning of Crossroads Pt 1.

And he's still limping at the end of Crossroads Part II.

 

[Steel_Wind]

IIRC 'Boomer' said eight not "Five". I don't have time to watch the DVD right now to confirm that but I might do that tonight.

Whether it was eight or five has nothing to do with the Final Five. None of the standard cylons, with the possible exception of Brother Cavel, knows who the Final Five are. Boomer certainly didn't know. Any answer she gave was with respect to the known seven models - not the Final Five.

It's pretty hard to rationalize the torture and blinding of Saul Tigh by his cylon captors if they knew who and what he was.

 

[Wormwood]

Abigail Nussbaum comes close to my feeling on this.

This season feels like it is descending into the same level as 24 and Lost. Where the show comes close to surrealism and fans know it just isn't supposed to make sense anymore. Worldbuilding is pratically a mess of incoherence half-completed ideas. I mean, I don't know what cylons are anymore. My affection for this series has been slowly waning this entire season. Like Abigail, this episode broke me as well.

Thank you for your post and the site you referenced.

Both articulate my feelings much better than I could.

edit: ESPECIALLY the part about Moore's Kobols' Last Gleaming Podcast. I had the identical reaction to his flippant decision to kick the conceptual antpile and worry about the details later.

I was relieved that calmer heads prevailed in that case---but now that I see the same thing happening again (mainly, the obvious dilemma that they caught themselves in when they reduced the Cylons from 12 models to 7 + Final Five).

I no longer know if I'm willing to go on this journey with them. Which is a pity, really.

 

[BlueBlackRed]

Another woefully disappointing episode.

Like Lost, the makers of this show have taken their viewers for granted.

I waited the whole season for the show to get better, and I got a contrived pile of junk.

I will repeat what I've said before - toss this season's writers out of the airlock.

 

[Volaran]

Whether it was eight or five has nothing to do with the Final Five. None of the standard cylons, with the possible exception of Brother Cavel, knows who the Final Five are. Boomer certainly didn't know. Any answer she gave was with respect to the known seven models - not the Final Five.

It's pretty hard to rationalize the torture and blinding of Saul Tigh by his cylon captors if they knew who and what he was.

My point here is actually that with this choice, there are now loose threads earlier in the series that can be picked up. I certainly don't think that any of the 'standard' Cylons, with the possible exception of Cavil, consiously know about the Five, but what might be embedded in them still has yet to be explored.

In that particular case, it still might be nothing more than I lie she told Baltar to get him to stop. Just an example of something that might become more, depending.

The blog linked to earlier, as well as some of the posts in this thread lead me to believe that some of the people going to the podcasts and looking behind the scenes at the meta-nature of the show are probably diminishing what is already becoming minimal interest. To be left hanging, and then hear the showrunner say 'I don't even know if we'll pick this up again' or 'We're putting this out here, but its crazy and we haven't decided what it means yet.' will certainly leave people frustrated. In those cases, it might be better to never 'peak behind the curtain'.

I love to see the process behind it, the same way I love a DM to reveal later on what was planned and what was done on the fly. When people throw out threads without knowing where they're going, it can really show their creative limits.

There is a point in the mini-series commentary track where, if memory serves me correctly, Ron Moore is talking about how the decision to make Boomer a Cylon was last minute. David Eick sort of coughs and mentions it is the DVD commentary. Ron Moore sort of jokingly backtracks and says that Boomer being a Cylon was always part of his "five year plan" which I always took as kind of a reference to JMS and Babylon 5.

I sort of look at B5 and BSG almost as one might look at two types of D&D campaign. B5 strikes me as a really well crafted store bought adventure (maybe a Shackled City or something to that effect). Excellent story, excellent characters, guided by a single vision.

The weakness in this shows in several ways. At times, the characters seem to speak with a single, interchangable voice, that of the creator, which can take you out of the show. Also, when people other than the creator affect the plot (actor leaving, series cut short, series renewed after most major plotlines are finished). It might feel a little...railroaded at times. Still, the show did new things and interesting things in a science fiction television series, and ended up with a high quality whole.

I think BSG show-runners might be compared to a really good DM who has a general idea of where the campaign is going 10 sessions in advance, a good amount of back story, but is really prepared to wing it and allow things to go in a completely different direction if something seems interesting.

The down side of this approach is that you might never pick up on plot threads dangled early, more inconsistencies are going to show up the longer you go, and sometimes characters are going to be displaced from the forefront, making efforts to reconnect with them seem forced.

Obviously with BSG, I can't yet evaluate the finished product, but I'm generally happy tuning in week after week, and am still interested in what happens to all the characters and their universe, so I'd say it's still working for me.

I might be able to point out what I like about the show, but I'm certainly not going to be able to say "And you like the show now" any more than someone could tell me that I'm not enjoying it. However, I do think some people who are on the edge about it due to commentary from the production crew might want to put the curtain back, take their seats, and let the show take them where it will.

So says the rampant spoiler-seeking, process-hound.

That's my rambling two cents (canadian).

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

The blog linked to earlier, as well as some of the posts in this thread lead me to believe that some of the people going to the podcasts and looking behind the scenes at the meta-nature of the show are probably diminishing what is already becoming minimal interest.

Myself, I stopped listening to the podcasts midway through the first season and I haven't gone back since. But the blog post I linked to does articulate quite a bit of what didn't work for me though.