Author Topic: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread  (Read 75544 times)

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
That just brings to light a different issue: what the hell went wrong?  As has been stated numerous times in this thread B&C just isn't as good as S1 and S2 of BSG.
17:37:02   Quanto: I want to have sexual intercourse with every space elf in existence
17:37:11   SpardaSon21: even the males?
17:37:22   Quanto: its not gay if its an elf

[21:51] <@Droid803> I now realize
[21:51] <@Droid803> this will be SLIIIIIGHTLY awkward
[21:51] <@Droid803> as this rich psychic girl will now be tsundere for a loli.
[21:51] <@Droid803> OH WELLL.

See what you're missing in #WoD and #Fsquest?

[07:57:32] <Caiaphas> inspired by HerraTohtori i built a supermaneuverable plane in ksp
[07:57:43] <Caiaphas> i just killed my pilots with a high-g maneuver
[07:58:19] <Caiaphas> apparently people can't take 20 gees for 5 continuous seconds
[08:00:11] <Caiaphas> the plane however performed admirably, and only crashed because it no longer had any guidance systems

 

Offline karajorma

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
I think one problem with Blood and Chrome is basically that they learned the wrong lesson from Caprica. Caprica was low on the action and high on dialogue and characterisation. For all its (many) flaws the main characters weren't one dimensional stock characters precisely because the show spent maybe too long on character and not enough time on actually having them do something important to the plot.

Blood and Chrome went too far in the other direction. It's all flashy CGI and space battles but with no characters in the show we actually care about, who cares? I'm not certain how much of that is due to them removing large chunks of the show in order to butcher it for this webisode madness. Maybe the extended version will make me care a bit more about the people involved, but I am starting to doubt it.
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Offline torc

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
cylon meat.... WTF?
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Offline karajorma

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Well we do know that the Cylons end game was to make the skinjobs, so it's not that far-fetched.

The real problem is that it then seems kinda odd that they'd need to be doing what they were up to in Razor. If they already had cyborg snakes, they were almost there already anyway.
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Offline newman

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
That's assuming the script went through some sort of peer review / sanity check. It doesn't look like it has - I don't care how much good stuff were these writers involved with before, they cocked up this one. Uninteresting plot with bland two dimensional characters that perform incredibly unrealistic, susension of disbelief breaking actions every few minutes. I really can't help but be reminded of the Star Wars prequels every time they release an episode.
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Offline Angelus

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Hm, the Osiris would have had a chance, if they didn't order the ship on Naboo, but from the Separatists instead.

It started bad, and with every episode it gets worse.
I'm not quite sure what purpose these Snake hybrids serve, apart from having another pointless scene.
The entire skinjob/ hybrid thing should have dropped for B&C...with pretty much everything else they showed us.

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Ramirez! Protect the Burgertown!
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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
^ I loved that line, just for the way it un-self-conciously adds to the confusing Gordian Knot that is race and ethnicity in the 12 Colonies. What would a Colonial named "Ramirez" look like? I don't know, all the latinos we've seen so far are from Tauron and speak ancient greek. Baltar and Sharon both have hints of an Aerilon accent. The Gemenese tend to be dark-skinned, except when they aren't. It was all just slipshod world-building from day one, so why not have some fun with it?

That just brings to light a different issue: what the hell went wrong?  As has been stated numerous times in this thread B&C just isn't as good as S1 and S2 of BSG.

No, it's been stated several times that B&C just isn't as good as the best episode of BSG. There were a fair amount of clunker scenes and clunker episodes in the parent show, but aside from some half-hearted allusions to the miniseries (by this point, we'd seen a woman in a red pantsuit and watched Starbuck make four laps through Galactica's one figure-eight hallway!), no one seems to be rating it in comparison to all the episodes of the show. Remember Sharon's optical-out port in her forearm and ability to take over for the ship's computer? The ten-episode Kobol arc which probably could've been done in five? Adama solving everyone's problems with a Captain Picard speech in "Litmus"? Apollo Return-of-the-Jedi-ing his way into a Cylon mine? Practically everything about "Scar" and "Black Market"?

But no, let's compare it to "Resurrection Ship II," an episode where the action was utterly superfluous to the drama. You can't say RS was a better action/adventure story that B&C, because it wasn't an action/adventure story. You could cut the entire actual Resurrection Ship from the plot and it'd still be an amazing episode, because the problem of the episode is that Cain has come in and turned the fleet upside down and will probably kill everyone, not that there's a big Cylon thing that needs blowing up. "The Hand of God," "Scar," "Exodus," or the middle third of "Daybreak" would be better comparisons. Saying B&C isn't as good action as RS is like saying "Independence Day" isn't as good of a disaster movie as "North By Northwest." One may be better than the other, but you're comparing apples to oranges while saying you're not. It's not useful criticism.

Here's some useful criticism: The artificial ten-part structure requires a strongly serialized plot (Eick compares to Republic Movie serials from the '30s like The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon). Each part needs to stand on it's own as a little story, but also needs to plug into the larger whole, leaving little space for intimate side-scenes, so character development is done with a broadsword (Coker meeting his buddy, Beka talking about her dead husband), because they can't count on the viewer remembering something from fifteen minutes ago because it might've been two weeks ago for the typical audience member. The use of stock characters and military clichés compensates for this, but it isn't exactly a solution (hopefully, the additional material for the TV and DVD edits is more stuff like Coker's buddy, and less pew-pew shooting).

They obviously don't want to do a Battlestar Galactica retread, so they've been try to split out specific elements of the parent show for the spinoffs, rather than trying to do another high-tension action/drama epic. The trouble is that they've been going too far towards the extremes, and then need to hew back to the mixed approach of the original show (the whole "less dancing, more shooting" shift between Caprica's first and second halves).

The young Adama section of Razor was clearly treated as a prototype for this series, and it was a big pile of top-gun clichés and stupid action and everyone loved it. Adama's girlfriend who got fridge'd in the opening, Adama flying off against orders to chase the two Raiders down to the planet because he's The Young Hothead, the Point Break skydive fistfight, the Centurions which may or may not have been bleeding blood, the freaky biological experiments which both explain why Adama leapt to the conclusion that the first guy he met with the sniffles was a robot and make you wonder why no one else was expecting humanoid Cylon spies to start showing up. And don't forget Little Lucy Cain (her actual, credited name) and her dolly, a stock character that makes Coker the drunken short-timer look like Hamlet.

B&C is the Razor Flashbacks, but longer and with more money, which is exactly what was promised.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Quote
But no, let's compare it to "Resurrection Ship II," an episode where the action was utterly superfluous to the drama. You can't say RS was a better action/adventure story that B&C, because it wasn't an action/adventure story. You could cut the entire actual Resurrection Ship from the plot and it'd still be an amazing episode, because the problem of the episode is that Cain has come in and turned the fleet upside down and will probably kill everyone, not that there's a big Cylon thing that needs blowing up. "The Hand of God," "Scar," "Exodus," or the middle third of "Daybreak" would be better comparisons. Saying B&C isn't as good action as RS is like saying "Independence Day" isn't as good of a disaster movie as "North By Northwest." One may be better than the other, but you're comparing apples to oranges while saying you're not. It's not useful criticism.

Man, I could not disagree with this paragraph more. The climactic action sequence of the Res Ship arc - including especially the shots that are entirely CGI porn - is inextricably tied up with the thematic and narrative course of the story and could not possibly be excised without dramatically lessening the whole. The reason everyone loves the battle in Res Ship 2 is that it is not the same as Hand of God or Daybreak pt 2; it's not mindless CGI filler to keep stupid viewers entertained. It's beautiful, purposeful visual art that is also an integral component of the narrative and thematic climax. The soundtrack, the score, the acting, every plot thread, they all come together right there, and the CGI acts in support.

I also think you've badly misjudged the central problem of the Res Ship arc. It's certainly not 'Cain has arrived and will probably kill everyone'; it's precisely the opposite - Cain has arrived and her monstrosity might, horrifyingly, be what saves everybody. That's the danger: are her methods the only way to survive? Would we then still be worthy of survival?

As for B+C, it strikes me as so much less than what was promised. It wouldn't even make for good Stargate, let along good BSG.

e: One of my big problems with B+C is that it is bad at the micro level. Everything about it feels lazy. Each individual line is trite and familiar. The camera work during the effects shots follows the swooping mold of the Star Wars prequels, abandoning the visual stylings set by BSG. The rendering itself is lazy. Nothing in the story is anything we haven't seen before in BSG products. It asks no interesting questions, offers no interesting choices, presents no characters whose fates we care about.

We saw the black guy die first. We saw the guy who ~had a baby~ sacrifice himself (as of course he inevitably would). The ship crashed and they skidded right to the edge of a cliff! They fell down a hole and were attacked by a monster!

A BSG war show should be an arena to question the lengths to which humanity will go to survive when threatened with extinction. It should be a place to question the distinction and interdependence between man and machine. It doesn't need to be a Buck Rogers serial.
« Last Edit: November 24, 2012, 12:08:30 pm by General Battuta »

 

Offline Angelus

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
*snip*
B&C is the Razor Flashbacks, but longer and with more money, which is exactly what was promised.

Actually, i expected that B&C continue what the Razor flashbacks started - instead we got this.
With the Razor flashbacks, they had a good template to build upon, but they decided instead to turn everything upside down, retcon the **** out of it - to the point where it doesn't look or feel like a BSG show.

The decision to turn the B&C pilot into webisodes and cancel the show even before the pilot was aired happened for a reason. And after watching the B&C webisodes, i'm glad they canned it.



 

Offline NoSpin

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
^ I loved that line, just for the way it un-self-conciously adds to the confusing Gordian Knot that is race and ethnicity in the 12 Colonies. What would a Colonial named "Ramirez" look like? I don't know, all the latinos we've seen so far are from Tauron and speak ancient greek. Baltar and Sharon both have hints of an Aerilon accent. The Gemenese tend to be dark-skinned, except when they aren't. It was all just slipshod world-building from day one, so why not have some fun with it?

That just brings to light a different issue: what the hell went wrong?  As has been stated numerous times in this thread B&C just isn't as good as S1 and S2 of BSG.

No, it's been stated several times that B&C just isn't as good as the best episode of BSG. There were a fair amount of clunker scenes and clunker episodes in the parent show, but aside from some half-hearted allusions to the miniseries (by this point, we'd seen a woman in a red pantsuit and watched Starbuck make four laps through Galactica's one figure-eight hallway!), no one seems to be rating it in comparison to all the episodes of the show. Remember Sharon's optical-out port in her forearm and ability to take over for the ship's computer? The ten-episode Kobol arc which probably could've been done in five? Adama solving everyone's problems with a Captain Picard speech in "Litmus"? Apollo Return-of-the-Jedi-ing his way into a Cylon mine? Practically everything about "Scar" and "Black Market"?

But no, let's compare it to "Resurrection Ship II," an episode where the action was utterly superfluous to the drama. You can't say RS was a better action/adventure story that B&C, because it wasn't an action/adventure story. You could cut the entire actual Resurrection Ship from the plot and it'd still be an amazing episode, because the problem of the episode is that Cain has come in and turned the fleet upside down and will probably kill everyone, not that there's a big Cylon thing that needs blowing up. "The Hand of God," "Scar," "Exodus," or the middle third of "Daybreak" would be better comparisons. Saying B&C isn't as good action as RS is like saying "Independence Day" isn't as good of a disaster movie as "North By Northwest." One may be better than the other, but you're comparing apples to oranges while saying you're not. It's not useful criticism.

Here's some useful criticism: The artificial ten-part structure requires a strongly serialized plot (Eick compares to Republic Movie serials from the '30s like The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon). Each part needs to stand on it's own as a little story, but also needs to plug into the larger whole, leaving little space for intimate side-scenes, so character development is done with a broadsword (Coker meeting his buddy, Beka talking about her dead husband), because they can't count on the viewer remembering something from fifteen minutes ago because it might've been two weeks ago for the typical audience member. The use of stock characters and military clichés compensates for this, but it isn't exactly a solution (hopefully, the additional material for the TV and DVD edits is more stuff like Coker's buddy, and less pew-pew shooting).

They obviously don't want to do a Battlestar Galactica retread, so they've been try to split out specific elements of the parent show for the spinoffs, rather than trying to do another high-tension action/drama epic. The trouble is that they've been going too far towards the extremes, and then need to hew back to the mixed approach of the original show (the whole "less dancing, more shooting" shift between Caprica's first and second halves).

The young Adama section of Razor was clearly treated as a prototype for this series, and it was a big pile of top-gun clichés and stupid action and everyone loved it. Adama's girlfriend who got fridge'd in the opening, Adama flying off against orders to chase the two Raiders down to the planet because he's The Young Hothead, the Point Break skydive fistfight, the Centurions which may or may not have been bleeding blood, the freaky biological experiments which both explain why Adama leapt to the conclusion that the first guy he met with the sniffles was a robot and make you wonder why no one else was expecting humanoid Cylon spies to start showing up. And don't forget Little Lucy Cain (her actual, credited name) and her dolly, a stock character that makes Coker the drunken short-timer look like Hamlet.

B&C is the Razor Flashbacks, but longer and with more money, which is exactly what was promised.

THANK YOU.

The Cylon snake was a weird design choice, but yet again I enjoyed the last two episodes. (Though it pains me to see some of the shoddy SFX work, particularly during the Raptor crash scene)

Battlestar is a big universe guys. It has room for the over the top action (B&C), long winded political dramas (Caprica), and a healthy near perfect mix (Galactica Proper). Personally, I thought The Plan (aka the writers desperately trying to save face for writing themselves into a corner) was 10000000X worse than this. I found it absolutely painful to sit through. But I look forward to B&C every week.

It's different. You guys can claim it doesn't deserve to be called Battlestar Galactica, but it is. And it is still better than 90% of the crap on TV. Perhaps one day I will tell you young'ns the fable of Stargate Universe. And how fans of the series cries of "This isn't Stargate! Where's the corny squad leader with the one liners? Boycott this show!" got a fantastic show (except for the first half of Season 1, Blehhhhhh) and the last of the good sci fi on TV cancelled.

  

Offline StarSlayer

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
I don't particularly need to be told a history lesson on SGU by someone who is trying to make age assumptions over the internet. 

Let me break it down. 

Story wise B&C so far has been the perfect storm of over used tropes stacked one on top of the other with no reprieve.  At this point TOS portrayed a far more realistic and believable depiction of war, in fact its leagues better than B&C in pretty much every category.  This is a war for the very survival of humanity and instead its been composed of one completely ridiculous 80s cartoon gimmick after another, to the point I would not be surprised to see Cobra Commander in charge of a Basestar.  The fact that Adama set a gods damn Raider on fire by dumping fuel and hitting his frakking burners directly followed by attack of the toasterconda pretty much says it all.

The art direction has been absolutely horrendous both from a technical and fluff perspective.   Newman and LtC can point out a laundry list of purely CGI technical gaffs that have appeared so far.  For me, however, the treatment of the fluff/mechanical side is the more unforgivable.  Their slapdash retcon of Galactica physically isn't compatible with the show proper version.  I'm not even sure the new Vipers  are even capable of fitting into canon Viper tubes.  They fly in the face of Adama being established as a MK II pilot and the MKII being depicted as the main Viper of the war.  The Osiris is clearly depicted with box missile launchers in one episode which turn out to shoot flak like they are KEWs in the next.  The Valk, which is pretty clearly established as a new top of the line warship in Season 3 actually appears in 1CW.  At this point its hard to believe the crew on B&C even saw the RDM version let alone where heavily involved they've stomped on so much established canon and made so many painful errors in depicting the content.

If the Visual Effects depicted intelligent content but where poorly executed it would be totally acceptable. If the story occasionally threw in a cheeseburger action scene in an otherwise well handled plot then hey i can eat fast food once in a great while.  Instead B&C is well and truly holistically awful, about the only thing it succeeds at is make Galactica 1980 look less terrible.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
It's different. You guys can claim it doesn't deserve to be called Battlestar Galactica, but it is. And it is still better than 90% of the crap on TV. Perhaps one day I will tell you young'ns the fable of Stargate Universe. And how fans of the series cries of "This isn't Stargate! Where's the corny squad leader with the one liners? Boycott this show!" got a fantastic show (except for the first half of Season 1, Blehhhhhh) and the last of the good sci fi on TV cancelled.

SGU was indeed a great show towards the end, you're right about that. But while BSG may be a big universe, quality is quality, and B&C lacks quality. It's not 'over the top action' so much as 'bad over the top action'.

Don't be a fan; don't defend this show because it has your brand attached. In a golden age of really good dramatic TV this feels like something out of the 90s.

 

Offline newman

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
I liked Stargate: SG-1 for it's campy humor. I liked SGU, particularly towards the end, for other reasons completely. I'm perfectly capable of judging a product based on what it is, and not based on what it isn't compared to something else. Even so, B&C is horrendous.

So, it's basically pure action? Sure, let's judge it on those merits alone. In Razor, we saw a scene where Adama ejected over a planet, then had a mid-air fight with a Centurion as he was falling down, James Bond style. It was really a cheeseburger scene, but it was digestible because the rest was on the level. B&C is composed entirely of these types of cheeseburger scenes. You see, good action needs to have a quality that enables you to suspend your disbelief. Of course it's not realistic, but it needs to feel real enough while also providing the viewer with enough thrills and spectacle. It's a fine balance that BSG did well in my opinion. In B&C, the main characters perform stupid, totally unbelievable death-defying maneuvers every few minutes, and this shatters my suspension of disbelief. When this happens, I'm left with a bunch of bad CGI and horrible design decisions, because I know now the main characters have plot armor and the suspense gained for rooting for main characters is gone.

First of all, this is Adama, so he'll live. As for his co-pilot and the woman, they'll obviously live too, because every time they're in danger, Adama's going to pull off something so over the top it's boring at best, but just plain dumb most of the time. Please don't tell me that Adama evading giant plungers in a raptor, like in a 1990 video game, is good TV. Or dumping fuel + activating burners makes for an insta-flying flamethrower that shoots down the pursuing raider. It's not good action, it's dumb and boring. All it's missing so far is Jar-Jar and reflective ships and it'd be The Phantom Menace. Except it's already got reflective ships :P
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Offline Ace

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
It'd be more interesting if he tried to pull off clever stunts, which don't work, and he has to improvise more. (or crash and deal with centurions on the ground coming after them, etc.)
Ace
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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Man, I could not disagree with this paragraph more. The climactic action sequence of the Res Ship arc - including especially the shots that are entirely CGI porn - is inextricably tied up with the thematic and narrative course of the story and could not possibly be excised without dramatically lessening the whole.

And that's why most of it happens off-screen while Baltar and Gina have a heart to heart, and the rest of it happens off-screen while Lee succumbs to hypoxia. Meanwhile, the post-battle scene of Starbuck and Fisk preparing to carry out their final orders goes in one uninterrupted sequence, to show its relative unimportance and how it totally isn't the climax of the three-parter.

The reason everyone loves the battle in Res Ship 2 is that it is not the same as Hand of God or Daybreak pt 2; it's not mindless CGI filler to keep stupid viewers entertained. It's beautiful, purposeful visual art that is also an integral component of the narrative and thematic climax. The soundtrack, the score, the acting, every plot thread, they all come together right there, and the CGI acts in support.

So, in other words, the Resurrection Ship three parter is not an action story.

I also think you've badly misjudged the central problem of the Res Ship arc. It's certainly not 'Cain has arrived and will probably kill everyone'; it's precisely the opposite - Cain has arrived and her monstrosity might, horrifyingly, be what saves everybody. That's the danger: are her methods the only way to survive? Would we then still be worthy of survival?

For a while, I was utterly confused by this, wondering if you watched the same episodes I did. Nearly every scene she was in or talked about painted Cain as deluded, ineffective, or both. Her first statement after arriving in the fleet is, "Welcome back to the Colonial Fleet." Adama lost eighty people in the Cylon attack, while Cain lost ten times as many, in an ill-considered suicide mission which she carried out after murdering a fellow officer and close friend. Adama protected the civilian fleet through hundreds of Cylon attacks, while Cain, with twice the firepower and a quarter as many people to protect, got all her civilians killed in one day. Baltar got a full dossier on the Resurrection Ship from Gina in five minutes with a set of clean clothes and a sliced apple, while Cain ordered the torture of Sharon, undoing months of goodwill with no gain.

Cain refused to give Roslin or the Fleet the time of day, furnishing Galactica with supplies and ignoring the rest of the Fleet. Cain claimed to be on "detached service" when the President could literally see her out the window, demonstrating a contempt for the very rule of law from which she derived her authority. To paraphrase Lee, if Roslin isn't President, then Cain isn't an Admiral, Adama isn't a Commander, and no one has to listen to a damn thing Cain says.

Everything in the three-parter, and Razor, demonstrated Cain to be a danger to herself and others. Like the best dicators, she can only maintain her position through a combination of charisma and unflinching brutality.

Then I realized that you were talking about Adama and Roslin deciding the only way to solve the Cain problem was to shoot her in the head. Here's the problem with that, though. Stabbing Cain in the back, while certainly crossing a moral line, is nowhere near the equivalent of summarily executing an insubordinate officer (who, incidentally, was right), summarily executing dozens of innocent people and leaving thousands more to die, or condemning her own crew to a guaranteed suicide-by-Cylon. If Almighty God hadn't intervened to make sure Cain's chickens came home to roost at that exact moment, Adama would've just postponed the inevitable confrontation with Cain or, worse, ceded leadership of the Fleet to her, leaving him to join the silent, bullied mass of humanity that let her commit atrocity after atrocity while saying nothing (the most depressing thing about Razor is that aside from Belzen, no one ever stood up to her, even when they were dead meat either way. It kind of puts a damper on my argument that BSG is about the triumph of the human spirt over unimaginable adversity, and makes the flashbacks in the movie a fairly dry recitation of stuff we already knew with no surprises. Imagine if one of the civilian ships Cain was pirating went on a suicide run against the Pegasus, and Cain had it shot down. That would've been an addition which is both plausible, and plausibly wouldn't be mentioned by Fisk to Tigh).

Is Adama still worthy of survival when his act of mercy leads to Cain taking over the Fleet when Roslin dies a week later? When she starts wiring civilian ships to nukes and using them as traps or fireships? Saying murdering Cain to prevent her from committing atrocities is itself a vindication of those atrocities is nonsense, like a racist demanding that you tolerate his intolerance.

Luckily, when Adama actually did have to take a stand against a murderous despot taking over the fleet without God intervening to keep his hands clean, he didn't have another battlestar full of troops to fight against, and you know what happened? Adama won, and then he shot the bastards, because otherwise, they would've kept making people die needlessly. And it still wasn't a vindication of Cain's "If it doesn't make you want to vomit from its sheer depravity, it's not a difficult enough decision to be the correct one" philosophy.

Cain is absolutely the antagonist of Pegasus/Resurrection Ship. The question is not whether her methods are necessary, it's whether her methods will allow her to overwhelm our heroes, who live by a moral and ethical code, and tear down everything they've fought to preserve. In grand morality-play fashion, Cain doesn't, because her own decisions result in her being shot in the face without any help from Adama and Roslin.

In either case, though, the Resurrection Ship itself is not the antagonist of this non-action story, making it a poor comparison for a story where the military objective is the primary plot of the drama.

(Now wasn't that much more fun than just saying, "It sucks," "Yep, sure does," in an endless loop every friday? That's why I'd like to actually discuss B&C)

We saw the guy who ~had a baby~ sacrifice himself (as of course he inevitably would).

No, he didn't. He *****ed out and flew away. Why, there are any number of things that could happen now. He could have a crisis of conscience, return and then sacrifice himself in a later segment, making you right retroactively. He could defect to the Cylon side. He could survive the whole thing, at which time Coker and Adama have to decide if they'll tell the truth about him deserting them or cover for him.

See, B&C has already surprised you, and you didn't even notice.

The decision to turn the B&C pilot into webisodes and cancel the show even before the pilot was aired happened for a reason. And after watching the B&C webisodes, i'm glad they canned it.

It was originally intended to be a webseries, then aired on TV, then released on video. After seeing the script, SyFy decided to skip the web part, then after seeing how long it was taking to do 1,800 effects shots, they decided to go back to the original plan. Then they apparently assed around for a year until finding an on-line distribution partner with the infrastructure to hold up to a massive influx of traffic, and then put it on YouTube, just like any idiot could. I blame brain-spiders for that last part.

At this point TOS portrayed a far more realistic and believable depiction of war, in fact its leagues better than B&C in pretty much every category.

At this point in TOS, Apollo was dating a reporter he'd know for five minutes who had been widowed for six minutes (whom he'd marry in the next episode, with her widowing him immediately thereafter), and Jimmy Carter's President Adar's naiveté had mistaken a Soviet Cylon attack for a welcoming committee, which seems odd for someone raised in a society that's been at war for a thousand yahrens (same goes for Apollo, Starbuck, and Zac talking about the good old days before the war, when they were a Star Trek ripoff and not a Star Wars ripoff). Starbuck hadn't decided to go AWOL to manage a set of three-faced singers on their tour to the ruined husks of the twelve worlds yet, though, so you've got that going for you.

At this point its hard to believe the crew on B&C even saw the RDM version let alone where heavily involved they've stomped on so much established canon and made so many painful errors in depicting the content.

The problem is, I've been hearing variations on this comment since season two first aired. I probably would've heard it with "33," if "Litmus" hadn't been my first episode. At this point, I've become inured to cries of "They're ruining it! Let's all talk about how much it sucks now that they're ruining it!"

In B&C, the main characters perform stupid, totally unbelievable death-defying maneuvers every few minutes, and this shatters my suspension of disbelief.

I agree with your analysis. It's not the quality of the action, it's the quantity of the action. B&C's fatal flaw is the relentless pacing. I just don't care about that problem so much, and I recognize it as being inherent to the premise. Big epic war action and impossible set-pieces in stand-alone ten-minute chunks is pretty much the design brief for every "Halo" game (except they chunk into thirty seconds).

I've been spoiled on the fate of Beka, but I'm honestly not sure if Coker is going to be inspired by Adama's can-do spirit to re-up so he can be part of the future installments they had in mind, or if he's going to fall victim to retirony. I suppose it could be both. Anybody want to start a pool?

Except it's already got reflective ships :P

Note to self, don't tell newman if I start experimenting with linear color space. ;)

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
That is an awful lot of words in defense of a really bad TV show. And boy I pray your reading of Res Ship is wrong, as I'd lose most of my respect for the show if it were right.

e: Part of why Razor was so bad was that it missed the most powerful part of the tension in Res Ship, the straightforward mimesis of the post-9/11 debate between deontology and utilitarian exigency. Cain is supposed to represent the exigent force, but if she appears incompetent or never gets any kind of results (even in the short term) the tension doesn't work. I - and hopefully most of the audience - want to see the deontological force win out, because we believe that 'evil' methods like torture create the very enemies we try to fight, but for the drama to be powerful the exigent force must have some claim. The very heart of BSG's interest as a theater for the examination of moral questions lies in the fact that it raises the stakes so high even very extreme exigent claims can be considered.

Most of what you wrote seems to be pretty orthogonal to what it's responding to, so I'm not sure if I should try to restate or just let it go.
« Last Edit: November 24, 2012, 10:26:04 pm by General Battuta »

 

Offline karajorma

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
I agree with your analysis. It's not the quality of the action, it's the quantity of the action. B&C's fatal flaw is the relentless pacing. I just don't care about that problem so much, and I recognize it as being inherent to the premise. Big epic war action and impossible set-pieces in stand-alone ten-minute chunks is pretty much the design brief for every "Halo" game (except they chunk into thirty seconds).

I've got to say I'm tempted to agree to that. Had we seen those manoeuvres over the course of an entire series, they wouldn't be anywhere near as bad.

I think the issue here is the one you bring up, it was originally written as a series of webisodes and they wanted to have a big moment in each. Of course they missed the point that even the other BSG webisodes got, we don't need thrills and spills in every episode as long as there is some progression.
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Offline Lt.Cannonfodder

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
Note to self, don't tell newman if I start experimenting with linear color space. ;)

You don't experiment with it you; you use it.

Carry on :)

 

Offline StarSlayer

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Re: [Spoilers] Blood & Chrome - The Discussion Thread
(Now wasn't that much more fun than just saying, "It sucks," "Yep, sure does," in an endless loop every friday? That's why I'd like to actually discuss B&C)

It certainly was and it was a good read, but there really hasn't been much to dissect in B&C.  I know ***** ranting gets old, but so far B&C has had ore in common with one of those films like The Room or Resident Evil that you get together to rag on than discuss thought provoking content.  If they simply took the foot off the gas it would be much more enjoyable and likely leave time for more interesting plot points to be worked in.  Stock Galactica and regular IIs alone would have been much easier stomach then making changes to iconic parts of the show.  If say Adama had destroyed the pursuing Raiders by touching off Acheron's exposed magazines instead of flying through giant cylinder heads it would have been still showy without being over the top.  In Osiris' battle with the Baseship have her close to launch nukes only to have them jam in the silos and accidentally take out both ships rather than utilizing another ramming sequence.  Heck use the missile batteries as missile batteries that are painfully ineffective in the face of Cylon ECM.  The air to air battle could have been resolved in some fashion without resorting to fuel air flame thrower.  Completely cut out the toasterconda and use some time to do some character building.

I suppose C&C isn't much better than saying it sucks but its the best I can muster.  Are there actually discussion topics you have to chew on in regards to B&C?
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