BattleStar Galactica was a horrible show

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I talk to an obnoxious person on vent quite regularly and he thinks that battlestar galactica is like one of the greatest TV shows ever.

I missed a couple of seasons so my knowledge of the show isnt 100% watertight so I need some fact-checking/ideas

My main point is that Baltar was a giant waste of time.

There were many scenes of him talking a virtual no.6 lady and it didnt really affect the storyline of the show, so all those scenes were a waste of time.
He was turned into some kind of holy man near the end of the show for crappy reasons, a bunch of women built a shrine to him because he released his autobiography apparently and then they attributed the healing of a child to him with no real evidence.

The existence of the imaginary woman (virtual no.6) was hand-waved as being an 'angel of god' seems like a crappy origin for a character in a Science Fiction show doesnt it?


The reason for the cylon civil war doesnt seem to make sense, correct me if im wrong but it stemmed from one side wanting to lobotomize the spaceships so they would kill all humans, instead of breaking off attacks to preserve a cylon/human.
Why couldnt they simply abduct/withdraw the cylon human, and destroy the humans fleet with their superior technology.

Also there was no point in breaking off an attack that might kill a cylon human if they have resurrection ships??

The end of the show seemed stupid as the humans were allowed to bargain in a truce despite being overwhelmed in numbers.
The human/cylon hybrid could have been replaced easily by simply abducting a human and forcing them to mate with a cylon or stealing human eggs. So a replacable child deciding the fate of everyone seems stupid.

I liked it at the beginning, thought it got a little bit meh by the end of the second season, and then it got to be ass really quickly so I never even finished season 3.

I was going to rage at you when I thought you meant the original show. Which, while it has some terribad episodes, and while the mormon overtones were faaaaaaar too much even after they deleted many of the over-the-top scenes, was still awesome, especiall in the two-part episodes (memorable ones include the gun on the frozen planet, the Pegasus episodes and especially the hilarious "cliffhanger" in-between them, and the Count Iblis arc, even if that one goes full derp in the end). The new series was banalshitboring in the first season; it seemed to FINALLY be starting to go somewhere in the two-part season finale but that's also where I stopped watching, and judging but what I read about the later seasons I'm quite glad I stopped there.

to be honest I dont remember hardly anything about the original show apart from how it looked.

The new BSG went into Lost territory pretty soon with the religious overtones being the main focus of the show,

Mm. First two seasons of BSG rank up there with my favourite teevee shows ever. My girlfriend kept bursting into tears during the rape scene

The original show always was a little campy and had some truly stupid storylines but for it's day and as a tv show it was pretty cool.

The new series was so shitty I couldn't even sit through one episode. The things they changed were just too stupid and worse than original ideas. Had they stuck a little closer to the original storyline it might have been pretty good. But Battlestar Galactica as a sci fi soap? No thanks.

I was just thinking of asking if it's worth a watch. Thanks for saving me from space angels.

The new BSG lost it the moment it showed a chick in the shoes of the cigar munching, bad ass space pilot with led the old show, which, i believe, occurs right in the first episode. I gave the series a very wide berth after that.

Wasn't the original BSG plot like that thing David Icke was talking about?

Have you guys heard about Macross?



Easily the best sci-fi show ever and Western sci fi stole a lot from it.

The prevailing storyline left quite a bit to the imagination. On it's surface it seemed as though it was a story about different 'tribes'
of mankind seeding the galaxy and the Galactica people being part of a tribe who had lost their habitable homeworld and were in danger of being exterminated by machines (I can't remember if the machines were created by them or if they originated elsewhere and am not exactly sure they made that abundantly clear). So they had reference to a nearby world (in Interstellar terms) and were headed there both to warn the inhabitants about the Cylons genocidal nature and to make a stand against them.

They left a lot of questions half or entirely unanswered and this was one of the things that made the storyline compelling. The open details never seemed artificial and whoever wrote it might have had some real talent. The actual episodes lacked a lot in terms of quality but - as I said before - especially for it's day and as a tv sci fi show (these were typically bottom of the barrel in terms of quality) it wasn't horrible. I wasn't a devoted fan to the original and was actually a little hopeful when I heard they were remaking it. It had a lot of potential that was - unfortunately - never brought to fruition in the recent series.

But then it was so mind numbingly pc and drama heavy I couldn't get through a single episode.

Yeah, BSG apparently hosted high school A/V clubs and the kids were fascinated with experimenting with zooming in and out when a steady shot would be called for.

This was never a problem in Robotech.

It was a prevailent fad in cinematography that has thankfully gone into full decline these days.

I think you meant to say Robotech which Babylon 5 was heavily inspired by. I recall an interview with the creator of B5 in which he mentioned the three greatest influences on his show: Macross, Robotech, and Robotech. FACT.

Pretty much, though I did end up watching the whole first season. Though this is probably the only time I've ever watched something on my PC while doing something else in the foreground - giving my full attention to it felt like wasting my life and I kept expecting it to get somewhere. As for the original I think the camp helped a bit; I tend to be more forgiving of campy stuff than stuff that takes itself far too seriously, and the new series is very, very guilty of the latter. At least the camp in the original was entertaining, and when there was no camp it was actually quite good.

I only watched the movie (Macross Plus I think?), and that was surprisingly good. It helps that the giant robot, while quite important to the plot, doesn't take center stage until quite a bit into it, and the various side plots are pretty interesting and come together quite nicely. Also, absolutely fantastic soundtrack IIRC.

I ended up watching it all, because I thought the general premise and the first season showed tons of promise, and actually had some cool episodes (the first episode after the mini-series was especially well done). After that it became Banal Shit Boring as the character dramas and the ridiculous religious overtones got out of hand (that pseudo-spiritual bullshit they tried to pawn off was fucking insulting). Also, they tried to be too topical and deal with issues that "OMG WE DEAL WITH THAT NOW" type shit. It came off as pandering to the retarded and became more than a little boring.

I liked the original, and Macross, too. But both had children as target markets.

Same, except I stuck it out to the (very shitty) ending.

I really, really like Macross Plus. I don't really recall the original Robotech, but the recent Macross series have been shitty.

Can't honestly think of a better sci-fi show in the world that I have seen.

The writing is more professional than in B5, the characters are almost all very compelling, there is no clear right choices, the crew makes hard choices on a daily basis, and probably most importantly, I have never seen any tv show with so many good actors in one show. Never. The acting is just spot on.

The only really nice thing in B5 was the storyline and Lando and G'Kar, but other than that it's probably my second favorite.

I guess I'm just not as smart or tasteful as you monocled gentlemen. But if anyone here were to ask me, I'd tell them this: "I thought this show would be terrible. I was very cautious from the very start. But it soon became clear that the writing and acting in it were parallel to nothing else, so I can recommend this show with only three slight reservations: The Black Market episode is terrible, the ending could be better and the whole Starbuck storyline at the end could have been done away with."

Edit: Also those scenes where Baltar talks to the woman? They were the most important and best ones. Not even kidding. I guess it just didn't work for you.

Ugh, the ending was probably one of the worst I've ever seen. Could have been better? I certainly fucking hope so. When they introduced the Pegasus, from then on it got shitty. There were a few decent episodes here and there, but largely shit. The inclusion of BS politics was really bad (anyone remember the abortion episode? yeah). Couple that with that fucking Dylan/Hendrix song that is somehow a fucking message from God, and the pseudo-spirtual angle that came out of no where in the later seasons... Yeah, fuck that show.

The pseudo-spiritual angle came out in the very first season. From Baltar and his mental porn babbling about god all the time to Roslin having visions of serpents and starting to read too much into the whole book of Pythia thing. Hell even the retarded explanation for all that was happening was hinted in that season.

I actually agree with Jasede here that the show is getting too much shit for what it did. Yes the ending was mind-numbingly retarded as was the metaphysical religious babble which after DS9 Moore apparently still didn't use enough, don't even get my started on the outright biowarian shit Jane Espenson wrote (hint it involves the miscarriage). Oh and obviously they raped the original by cherry picking a few things here and there and slapping the BSG logo on it which fans have a right to rage about.

But what Moore and company did was look at space opera and think how should it actually look if the classical science fictions conventions and tropes were stripped away or executed in a manner more akin from what you might expect in real life. They took away the planet of the week convention which you would expect from a show focusing on a group of traveling ships. They threw out the focus on technobabble and hi-tech porn. What they focused on instead (outside of the spiritual derp) was human nature when mankind was threatened with extinction. You had all the good and all the bad humans can do and the question whether with all our flaws we deserve to survive. You had characters who were never outright good or outright evil even the Cylons. Bah especially the Cylons.

They tried something which apart from B5 and maybe DS9 no show science fiction show did. Moore should not have used an existing franchise for this kind of project IMO and he should have kept that spiritual crap away from it. It was already annoying in DS9 in BSG he went overboard with it. But he still did something (not entirely) good and noteworthy as far as the genre is considered.

Also it's Londo not Lando ffs, why do people keep confusing Mollari's first name with the black guy from Star Wars

BSG miniseries: awesome.
BSG season 1: awesome.
BSG season 2: pretty great.
BSG season 3: women in bathtubs are computers
BSG season 4: turns out the smoke monster was a metaphor for cancer while Sawyer and Kate were dead all along

The boardgame is pretty solid though.