Making sense of neoBSG storyline...

[gigabytelord]

The best example for me, is Baltar's trial, who would have thought Adama of all people would exonerate him?

I know that blew me away, not that it happened, but because of the way it happened, not to mention the fact that by the end of the trail I was genuinely rooting for Baltar.

[Eternal_Freedom]

It's established that Adama is a man who stands by his beliefs and his word and that includes a belief in justice. He said it himself; the defence made it's case, the prosecution didn't. He remained objective, as a judge should be, whilst Roslin was far too convinced.

Of course, him being accused of perjury might have had soemthing to do with it, but I think that it didn't. Or rather, I like to believe it didn't affect his choice.

[Aniron]

The main problem with BSG for me, is that if you don't accept God as a guiding force for the storyline, then you're left with a story happening on sheer coincidence that defy any possible logic and statistics.

Who cares? It's a show driven by character moments and has been from the start. It's about how these people deal with their tragic circumstance and go off the deep end because of it.

[Scrib]

The main problem with BSG for me, is that if you don't accept God as a guiding force for the storyline, then you're left with a story happening on sheer coincidence that defy any possible logic and statistics.

Who cares? It's a show driven by character moments and has been from the start. It's about how these people deal with their tragic circumstance and go off the deep end because of it.

And for most of the first season that could have been achieved without some of the mythical babble. Or alternatively, they could have kept going on with the first season model, where things were more subtle and required less explanation. Either path was better than the one they took.

The first serie was pretty bland as far as character development, everyone was white or black, and that was that. This one simply gave zero credence to that kind of bullshit, and went fulltilt on smashing our every conceptions of how heroes should act.

So much so, that after a certain point I wasn't rooting for the "heroes" anymore. See: Gaeta's mutiny. When the mutineers who murdered the entire legislative government have the moral high ground, you know something's wrong.

[Crazedwraith]

In what sense did the mutineer's have the moral high ground?

[Aniron]

In what sense did the mutineer's have the moral high ground?

Those filthy Cylons, even the ones who abandoned their fleet and showed initiative that they wanted to help, cannot be trusted in any way. Allowing them to enter the Colonial fleet is traitorous and those who support it should be murdered.

[Crazedwraith]

In what sense did the mutineer's have the moral high ground?

Those filthy Cylons, even the ones who abandoned their fleet and showed initiative that they wanted to help, cannot be trusted in any way. Allowing them to enter the Colonial fleet is traitorous and those who support it should be murdered.

Are you serious?

The Cylon tech is explicitly the only thing that gave the ragtag fleet any hope of survival.

[Scrib]

In what sense did the mutineer's have the moral high ground?

Those filthy Cylons, even the ones who abandoned their fleet and showed initiative that they wanted to help, cannot be trusted in any way. Allowing them to enter the Colonial fleet is traitorous and those who support it should be murdered.

Are you serious?

The Cylon tech is explicitly the only thing that gave the ragtag fleet any hope of survival.

How exactly? It was a jump drive with a better range, which is worthless if you have no idea where Earth is and aren't racing someone there. It's not going to help you evade the other Cylons better either. So blanket pardoning and absorbing those Cylons at the risk of insurrection was nonsense.

And as for moral high ground I was referring to when Laura Roslin was willing to duke it out in the middle of the fleet because she thought Adama had been killed. Gaeta on the other hand was still sane and realized that fighting a Basestar in the middle of the last remnants of humanity wasn't anything approaching a good idea.

[Aniron]

Those filthy Cylons, even the ones who abandoned their fleet and showed initiative that they wanted to help, cannot be trusted in any way. Allowing them to enter the Colonial fleet is traitorous and those who support it should be murdered.

Are you serious?

The Cylon tech is explicitly the only thing that gave the ragtag fleet any hope of survival.

I'm not being serious, no. Those are just some of the arguments I hear when I discuss the issue. I don't think there was any justification for the mutiny, especially given that innocents, deck hands, died because precious Gaeta was upset that people no longer took him seriously. It was quite funny when the Quorum was killed on the orders of Zarek and Gaeta was just SHOCKED that something like that happened. Well, that's just too bad, Mr. Gaeta.

[Aniron]

How exactly? It was a jump drive with a better range, which is worthless if you have no idea where Earth is and aren't racing someone there. It's not going to help you evade the other Cylons better either. So blanket pardoning and absorbing those Cylons at the risk of insurrection was nonsense.

Was there a line about the biological goo the 6s were putting on the Galactica?

[Scrib]

How exactly? It was a jump drive with a better range, which is worthless if you have no idea where Earth is and aren't racing someone there. It's not going to help you evade the other Cylons better either. So blanket pardoning and absorbing those Cylons at the risk of insurrection was nonsense.

Was there a line about the biological goo the 6s were putting on the Galactica?

Except the original deal was FTL for citizenship. I never disputed the value of having Cylons for allies, I was pointing out how idiotic this was given the circumstances.

I'm not being serious, no. Those are just some of the arguments I hear when I discuss the issue. I don't think there was any justification for the mutiny, especially given that innocents, deck hands, died because precious Gaeta was upset that people no longer took him seriously. It was quite funny when the Quorum was killed on the orders of Zarek and Gaeta was just SHOCKED that something like that happened. Well, that's just too bad, Mr. Gaeta.

You realize that this is a gross oversimplification right? There were a bunch of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that Adama and Roslin seemed to ignore democracy whenever it suited them, and had directly subverted it at least twice. In reality, Tom Zarek was the actual president of the colonies, a fact that didn't stop Adama and Roslin from outsing him twice,installing an unelected Lee Adama in his place because they didn't like him.


Also; of course he was surprised, he had expected the Quorum to support him, they were the ones who had been neutered just recently. Nor could he have expected Zarek to do what he did, when sequestering the Quorum would have been as effective. No one complained when Roslin claimed ignorance about Tori's vote-fixing, even though she had far less reason to be surprised at what she did on her orders.

And on the Cylons; there's a huge difference between being sorry and being sorry because you're in trouble. The Fleet is in a tenuous position and they need allies, but lets not forget that it's those same Cylons that had no problem nuking billions of people. Them needing an ally against Cavil cannot change that, or the way that people rightly feel about them. After all, the last time Cylons wanted to 'help' upgrade human technology 12 planets got incinerated because of it.

[Crazedwraith]

The Cylon tech is explicitly the only thing that gave the ragtag fleet any hope of survival.

How exactly? It was a jump drive with a better range, which is worthless if you have no idea where Earth is and aren't racing someone there. It's not going to help you evade the other Cylons better either. So blanket pardoning and absorbing those Cylons at the risk of insurrection was nonsense.

And as for moral high ground I was referring to when Laura Roslin was willing to duke it out in the middle of the fleet because she thought Adama had been killed. Gaeta on the other hand was still sane and realized that fighting a Basestar in the middle of the last remnants of humanity wasn't anything approaching a good idea.

First at this point they were running out of fuel again. So the added jump drive range gave them increased chances of finding fuel/supplies/a place where they can live. So yes the upgrades were crucial.

As to 'the moral high ground'. That's it? Roslin wanted to fight the mutineers? What do you suggest as an alternative? You can't play with the soft gloves when it comes the mutiny. Or people will start to think its a good diea.

[Scrib]

The Cylon tech is explicitly the only thing that gave the ragtag fleet any hope of survival.

How exactly? It was a jump drive with a better range, which is worthless if you have no idea where Earth is and aren't racing someone there. It's not going to help you evade the other Cylons better either. So blanket pardoning and absorbing those Cylons at the risk of insurrection was nonsense.

And as for moral high ground I was referring to when Laura Roslin was willing to duke it out in the middle of the fleet because she thought Adama had been killed. Gaeta on the other hand was still sane and realized that fighting a Basestar in the middle of the last remnants of humanity wasn't anything approaching a good idea.

First at this point they were running out of fuel again. So the added jump drive range gave them increased chances of finding fuel/supplies/a place where they can live. So yes the upgrades were crucial.

As to 'the moral high ground'. That's it? Roslin wanted to fight the mutineers? What do you suggest as an alternative? You can't play with the soft gloves when it comes the mutiny. Or people will start to think its a good diea.

There's fighting mutineers and then there's fighting mutineers in the middle of civilian ships who may be caught in the crossfire, which if I'm remembering RDM's podcasts right, is exactly why Gaeta backed down, while Roslin was willing to risk both ships /and/ the fleet to bring down Zarek. Gaeta had already failed, most of the ships were staying with Roslin, risking the Basestar, your soon-to-be only military vessel in a battle with a ship that has generally done well against such ships is ludicrous. Especially if you're not just gonna launch Raiders and pummel the Battlestar since most of it's pilots are occupied.

[Crazedwraith]

Ok. It's been a while since I saw the mutiny episodes.

That's just contrived shit. If the captains of those ships can't figure out they should get out of the way of the woman screaming to high heaven she's going to kill every mutineer possible. They deserve to get smashed up in the crossfire.

And I'm not sure Gaeta knows he's lost and thus surrenders actually constitutes superior morale fiber. Since he started the mutiny and murdered a bunch of innocent people to start with.

[Scrib]

Ok. It's been a while since I saw the mutiny episodes.

That's just contrived shit. If the captains of those ships can't figure out they should get out of the way of the woman screaming to high heaven she's going to kill every mutineer possible. They deserve to get smashed up in the crossfire.

And I'm not sure Gaeta knows he's lost and thus surrenders actually constitutes superior morale fiber. Since he started the mutiny and murdered a bunch of innocent people to start with.

She was talking on the line with Galactica, who knew if it was public. With 30,000 people left who wants to take the chance?

Did he lose? It honestly depends on how many men he had and if Galactica's guns needed gunners. And Battlestars tend to do pretty well against Basestars.As far as anyone knew at the time if Roslin lost then Gaeta would have not only jumped away with some of the fleet but become defacto head of the military.

And I'm pretty sure the mutiny was meant to be as bloodless as possible. It was Zarek that went overboard and blew away a bunch of people he could have simply kept locked up. Which /I/ found to be contrived. Gaeta stayed true to his morals, regardless of others might have seen him. It would have caused more harm than good to fight so he backed down. The same cannot be said for Roslin.

[Aniron]

Ok. It's been a while since I saw the mutiny episodes.

Me too. I haven't seen it since it aired back in 2009.

I recently picked up the seasons to watch the week after next. Until then I will concede my argument that it wasn't justified.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

The main problem with BSG for me, is that if you don't accept God as a guiding force for the storyline, then you're left with a story happening on sheer coincidence that defy any possible logic and statistics.

Who cares? It's a show driven by character moments and has been from the start. It's about how these people deal with their tragic circumstance and go off the deep end because of it.

It's a shame, then, that the characters were all unwatchably dysfunctional.

[jollyreaper]

Because this is science fiction not fantasy or mythology. If you want to introduce "God", there damn well be a good in-universe rationalization of this crap.

In addition, "God" popped out from nowhere and only appeared in the final episode. There was NO foreshadowing that there was some higher power throughout the entire series. Yes, there was lots of mention of "God", but I thought it was some bullshit Cylon theology.

Honestly, that sounds like a problem between you and your attention span.

SF can be written for the benefit of people who like having mysticism and philosophical stuff thrown into the mix once in a while too, you know.

It certainly can be but this isn't even a flaw of mysticism vs. materialism but elementary bad writing. It's really going back to the ancient meaning of deus ex machina, resolving an irresolvable plot complication by having a god descend and make things right.

It's ok to write a show like a sitcom without a strict plot from season to season. That sort of thing is slice of live. But something that's trying to have big mysteries and big questions, it's pretty much a cheat not to know where you're going with it.

All of the biggest mistakes in the show came from a lack of foreplanning, as clearly admitted by RDM and crew in the podcasts. It's kind of hard to pick the biggest mistake, the one that made the storyline the most snarled and irretrievable.

Personally, I liked the elements tossed in with the miniseries and the first season. Religious robots? What's this whole God thing? What's the Cylon plan? How scary is it to have robots literally believing in a religion and acting to fulfill prophecy? Frankenstein creations rebelling against their makers, it's all good scifi stuff. The characters were interesting. It's just the lack of planning and forethought in the execution that undercut the impact of everything else.

[jollyreaper]

I'm confused, why is this so important? It's let on that they are indeed agents of god or angels rather, so why not just accept the fiction? Because in the end that's all it is. I've seen the entire show several times now and I always get the same message, granted it doesn't make a lot of sense without a little more explanation but it's a space opera, what exactly do you expect? It's well known that the directors did everything they could think of to limit the technobablylolwtf so they wouldn't loose viewers.

Because this is science fiction not fantasy or mythology. If you want to introduce "God", there damn well be a good in-universe rationalization of this crap.

In addition, "God" popped out from nowhere and only appeared in the final episode. There was NO foreshadowing that there was some higher power throughout the entire series. Yes, there was lots of mention of "God", but I thought it was some bullshit Cylon theology.

What are you talking about?The whole series was saturated with references to religion, both monotheistic and polytheistic. Right from the very first episode there were strange,ambiguous little coincidences that were attributed to various deities. It was only later on that it was made clear that the Cylons were right, but the series never hid from the fact that there was some sort of higher 'plan'.

Now if only Ron Moore had also done some planning...

My pet theory was that the Cylons were forcing prophecy. The religion is based on cycles and what has happened before will happen again. So the old world was destroyed leading the colonials to leave and found the twelve colonies.

The Cylons feel they will find god or accomplish something of mystic significance by repeating the process. They can't do it themselves. Only humans can follow the path of god. In this case, Cylons are like Satan from the Jewish tradition, the accuser, an agent of god who tests the worthy to see the truth.

So they blew up the colonies to force the survivors on the journey. The Cylon fleet harries them as is their role but the expectation is the survivors will achieve the mystic goal. That is the plan, forcing prophecy. The plan looks like sheer extermination at first but is more complicated than that.

The question of whether or not that's insane depends on whether or not the gods are really real. Just because a show has religion in it doesn't say whether or not the claims are true.

[Scrib]

All of the biggest mistakes in the show came from a lack of foreplanning, as clearly admitted by RDM and crew in the podcasts. It's kind of hard to pick the biggest mistake, the one that made the storyline the most snarled and irretrievable.

I would say Head Baltar. Before that Baltar's delusions were ambiguous, after it just left a huge pile of questions that were never to be answered.

That and the more ambiguous point where the Cylon God went from being a competing ideology to the driving force of the story while the Lords of Kobol angle seemed to fade away.

And how could I forget, bringing back Starbuck.

The Cylons feel they will find god or accomplish something of mystic significance by repeating the process. They can't do it themselves. Only humans can follow the path of god. In this case, Cylons are like Satan from the Jewish tradition, the accuser, an agent of god who tests the worthy to see the truth.

So they blew up the colonies to force the survivors on the journey. The Cylon fleet harries them as is their role but the expectation is the survivors will achieve the mystic goal. That is the plan, forcing prophecy. The plan looks like sheer extermination at first but is more complicated than that.

Except The Plan makes it clear that it was all a childish tantrum thrown by Cavil. He wasn't pretending, he really wanted them dead.

[someone_else]

I can see the moon. I can't hit a bird with a rock.

Turns out seeing things and hitting them with even smaller things have no bearing on each other.

There are guided smaller things, you know. From a race of LIVING MACHINES you'd expect decent automation.

Albeit nBSG weapon tech is so absurdly crappy I can only ignore it for sheer cool factor. Reminds me of my X3:Reunion/Terran conflict days... same kind of dogfighting, same overtly crappy missiles, same idiotic turrets, same weapon effects.

The Cylons feel they will find god or accomplish something of mystic significance by repeating the process.

It's much easier to explain this way: their coding is so fucked up they act without any real good reason. They are simply malfunctioning. (also explains why they don't MISSILE SPAM THE HELL OUT OF ANYTHING like any rational enemy would do, given the tech)

Let's think for a moment what could happen when you try to code a deeply religious AI that also can "feel" emulate emotions, and you screw up somewhere.

[Havok]

The main problem with BSG for me, is that if you don't accept God as a guiding force for the storyline, then you're left with a story happening on sheer coincidence that defy any possible logic and statistics.

Who cares? It's a show driven by character moments and has been from the start. It's about how these people deal with their tragic circumstance and go off the deep end because of it.

It's a shame, then, that the characters were all unwatchably dysfunctional.

I found their dysfunction extremely watchable.
It actually provided an interesting cultural contrast to the type of feigned and forced dysfunction we put on TV in reality shows. Dysfunction brought or exacerbated by cultural and racial genocide vs Dysfunction brought on by on or exacerbated by the quest for fame and pride.

[jollyreaper]

The malfunctioning Cylon scenario also works.

The idea I had for that is they are strong ai's and humans are worried about the possibility of rebellion so they are coded with hard wired instructions on what not to do. And you can't really muck with a thinking mind like that, ask it to operate on logic and then brainwash it.

So what you end up with is the machines trying to explain and rationalize the belief without proof, the faith they've been given. And so they end up like Jesuits with these elaborate and meticulously thought out arguments that are ultimately based on hokum and bullshit.

So the entire religion built up is to explain how perfect Cylons could be made by imperfect humans. The humans were instruments of god used to create them. And because they already have beliefs that are without proof, it makes them susceptible to taking human religious beliefs seriously. Their creators never ever intended the machines to get religion.


You could pretty much chuck the metaplot because it makes no sense. The only part that made a lick of sense was a Cylon civil war because there's no way for humans to defeat this enemy on their own.

[someone_else]

And you can't really muck with a thinking mind like that, ask it to operate on logic and then brainwash it.

Why? If it is a machine it will mindlessly follow its programming.

Simply, some huge band of idiots (not a single-man task) managed to make something that broadly acts like a human mind, but screwed up somewhere crucial since a functioning brain is murderously complex (and not really necessary for a "perfect" AI, but they are idiots), and after generations the problem got worse and the AIs started acting like fucking nuts.
Like wanting to make skinjobs and turning themselves into humans. And starting the cycle again by coding faulty (maybe even on purpose even if the "AI-person" doing it doesn't really know) AIs to be nearly exterminated by them and let the cycle begin anew.

[Channel72]

It's ok to write a show like a sitcom without a strict plot from season to season. That sort of thing is slice of live. But something that's trying to have big mysteries and big questions, it's pretty much a cheat not to know where you're going with it.

It's no so much of a "cheat" as it is the reality of television. How many series do you actually know of which started out with a season-spanning master-plot arc, and then actually followed through with this arc so that all questions raised in the early seasons were satisfactorily resolved by the end? The only show I know of which allegedly pulled this off was Babylon 5. (I say "allegedly" because I've never seen Babylon 5, so I'm only going by what I've heard.)

Just about every other popular show which had ongoing mysteries, from The X-Files, to Star Trek: Enterprise, to Lost, to nBSG, failed to weave together a coherent resolution to all the mysteries raised because the writers themselves just made up the mysteries on-the-fly in order to add suspense and increase viewership. You can call it lazy writing, which is fair, I suppose. But the reality is that writers are likely under enormous pressure to come up with ad-hoc gimmicks to increase ratings, giving them little time to work out a coherent resolution to every mystery (not to mention avoiding contradictions). Getting out a compelling mystery which keeps viewers in front of their TVs is ultimately more important than making sure the mystery plays out satisfactorily in the long run - especially given the fact that writers don't always know if the series will even make it to the next season.