QUOTE (Guy Kilmore @ Feb 15 2009, 22.20)

What is the time limit for "revenge" when you have been a victim of potential genocide? (No idea if they were or not, but who knows how many Cylons existed before or after the 1st war. The possibility is concievable that there was an equivilant successful attack or what not that did so. We have no idea if there was.)

The human fleet continued to upgrade is arament, the possible genocide would be fresh in the minds of those who experienced it, I am not seeing a difference in either of these positions.

Who are they getting revenge on? People who had nothing to do with their slavery and no influence on the conduct of the war? These are for the most part the children of the oppressors who have no individual culpability for the events that occurred. Further there had been 40 years of peace. The colonials had not attacked them during this time. They were not mobilizing for war. In fact they were largely ignoring the Cylons, they had moved on, Cylons were an afterthought for nearly everyone who hadn't lived through the war. The Cylons had infiltrated human societies. They would have known this. And still they attacked.

There was no revenge to be had against the actual culprits. No imminent threat of any sort. And they would have had a HUGE advance notice before there ever became one. The Cylons simply wanted to wipe out humanity and they did, without justification or provocation. Not even of the flimsiest sort.

I find this whole process kind of amusing. The writers essentially took the existing story, chopped it up and resewed it together to form a picture they certainly weren't shooting for until recently and to answer questions they weren't even trying to really ask 2 seasons ago. It fits better than I ever thought possible given their lack of real direction for such a long time, internal inconsistency, and sometimes incoherence, but its still a meatball surgery retcon. And now here we are, asking probing questions of this near finished Frankenstein, hoping to reveal mysteries that were not even contemplated during some of the earlier storypoints referenced.

I mean the most likely reason Cavil didn't take more extreme and comprehensive measures regarding the 5 and the other Cylon models? The writers had no idea he was gonna be the supreme puppet-master when they came up with Cylon Democracy and the Final 5. "We don't think about them" at the time was (probably) little more than a plot device to explain why they hadn't been outed by other Cylons (including Athena, who presumably would have told Adama) yet. I'm sure they intended to offer an explanation for why they didn't think about them, but I think its likely that they didn't have one yet. Nor did they (likely) think much of the "I didn't vote for it" line at the time as Cavils future role probably wasn't even on the drawing board yet. Essentially we're looking for meaning in things that were patched together, that initially weren't intended to be part of the same coherent whole.

QUOTE (Sebastian @ Feb 21 2009, 07.46)

How exactly did Boomer and Ellen find Galactica and, if they can, why can't Cavil? Was this explained in the episode?

Lets see, there's this.

Also, since when did giving machine guns to a bunch of rabid, fanatical cultists become a good idea? And are we supposed to buy for a second that Adama would be convinced by that pathetic little speech? Human solution? To what? Uncontrollable fanatics dolling out food is better than armed marines? So you want to get Baltar's posse armed and dangerous, fair enough. Find a fucking way that makes sense. This is just lazy fucking writing.

QUOTE (Werthead @ Feb 21 2009, 12.10)

Apparently this was a result of bad editing (brr, just had a Dark Days of Season 3 Flashback).

The story was supposed to run with the marines abandoning the supplies at the start due to a riot about to get underway, and then the Sons of Ares turned up and stole the supplies. This led into another scene where the Cylons offered the use of Centurions to police the ship, since so many Marines were lost in the mutiny, and Adama turns them down flatly. During Baltar's speech, Adama agrees to let Baltar's cult take over food distribution and act as a police force for Dogsville so he can concentrate his Marines elsewhere.

This explains things a hell of a lot better than the shittily-edited version we saw in the episode.

Yeah, it'd been better if they'd fleshed it out. But they still essentially pulled two (almost) brand new plotlines completely out of their asses in the Sons of Ares and the military distributed grain dole. I know they had some post-New Caprica refugees to contend with, but it seemed that most of that was settled now. Seems odd to bring them up pretty much out of the blue. And the Sons of Ares, who I assume are some militarist cult of sorts naturally adversarial to Baltar's monotheistic cult...where have they been for 3.5 seasons?

And does anyone in their right mind think its a good idea to have hordes of armed civilians running around a military ship? I mean couldn't the military have confiscated this shit sometime around season 1? Even fleshed out, it still seems like a lame way to get a bunch of guns in the hands of Baltar's fanatics. Weak.

QUOTE (Ran @ Feb 21 2009, 17.29)

EHK,

The Sons of Ares were introduced at the start of season 4. They're the guys who attack the commune the very first time, trying to grab Baltar. I believe there have been some other references to them as well.

Interestingly, the Battlestar wiki also notes that Zarek was behind the Sons of Ares in the first draft of that episode, and that he was the one encouraging them to go after Baltar and his cult. They dropped that, but another example of the kind of ideas they were kicking around about him.

Thats odd, I really don't remember them at all. Don't think I've missed an episode, so it must be my faulty memory. Fair enough.

I might have liked this episode if it aired a season or two ago, but right now with 3-4 episodes left in the series it seemed like a straight up waste of time. They have too much to cover to devote this much to a slow-paced character piece.

QUOTE (Shryke @ Feb 28 2009, 13.39)

How was it a waste of time? We focus on Starbuck (who will somehow be involved in the end, especially since she's looking like some sort of half-cylon now) and we focus on the Chief and Boomer, which sets up the kidnapping of Hera, which sets up the end game of the series I imagine.

The character pieces were great, and both led straight into important shit that ties them back to the overall story.

Because we have 4 hours of the ENTIRE show left and they decided to spend an entire hour on Boomer playing house with the chief and Starbuck playing piano with her invisible daddy. Especially after their utter botching of the Baltar twist, it strikes me as a gross mismanagement of resources. You've got time to give us 30 minutes of piano playing but not enough to fill in the necessary details to turn a thoroughly batshit storyline (Guns to Baltar) into something that ALMOST makes a tiny bit of sense? All that shit that Wert talked about that they left out...I'm not buying the time-crunch explanation anymore. Especially when you add in last week where even more time was wasted with shots of Adama looking constipated as he gazes at the ship. Character pieces are fine, but why the hell would you devote so much time to them when you had to cut essential foundation from other storylines that don't make a lick of sense without that background? Would Starbuck's bit really suffer with one less piano scene?

QUOTE (Bronn Stone @ Mar 1 2009, 04.50)

On reflection, one thing strikes me as notable in this episode. The six who asks for Boomer alludes to the existence of a significant Cylon penal system - with punishments that predate the destruction of the Resurrection Hub (Capital Punishment was not used before because it was pointless with the hubs - which implies something else WAS used to punish).

It is pretty hard to continue to cling to the belief of collective Cylon guilt across the models when we are shown this new evidence that the Cylons themselves have a tradition of individual responsibility, individual guilt and individual penalty.

Think its possible you might be reading a bit much into it? It could just be yet another example of the writers not being that careful. Do you really think any of them were considering the 'collective vs. individualism' implications when they wrote an offhand line about about no capital punishment before resurrection stopped? Even if there is something to it, voting in unison with ones model for the entire history of the species is much, MUCH greater evidence of collective thought and action than this instance is of individualism. And even if we can't hold every Cylon accountable for every Cylon crime, we still can with the genocide, because we know they voted for it in unison along their model numbers. Whatever flares of individualism they may have had, it wasn't enough for a single dissenting voice within the model numbers.

Well, Hal's article wasn't great but he did link to a pretty damned good one within there.

QUOTE

As Battlestar Galactica's ending draws near, I've found myself thinking about the show as a whole, trying to articulate to myself the core reasons why it went wrong. I think a major contributor has been the issue of focus: the writers' tendency to take their story to places it doesn't want to go, because their interest lies in topics that aren't supported by their worldbuilding or the simple facts of human nature.

The problem, however, with trying to denounce anti-Cylon sentiment as mere prejudice, is that when it comes to Cylons a blanket prejudice might very well be the only correct and moral response. There was a twisted sort of sense in Helo focusing on Sharon's race rather than her individual guilt back at the end of the first season, because at the time we were still thinking in human terms. To accuse Sharon of genocide made as much sense as holding a single Wehrmacht soldier responsible for the Final Solution. In the intervening two and a half seasons, however, we've learned that there's no such thing as a Cylon non-combatant or even a foot soldier. Their decisions, we've seen, are made en masse, with each model voting unanimously (Caprica breaking with the other sixes on the question of whether to nuke New Caprica was unprecedented and shocking). Unless the writers make a last minute revelation that the eights opposed the decision to attack the colonies, there's no other conclusion to draw but that when polled, Sharon said that yes, billions upon billions of dead humans sounded to her like a good start.

The writers of Battlestar Galactica have never tried to depict this tragedy because, once again, they're not interested in going where their premise demands that they go[6], and because they won't acknowledge the magnitude of what the Cylons destroyed and the justness of the rage humans should feel towards them, much less the complicity of every single Cylon in this crime, they get to pretend that the choice between granting the Cylons Colonial citizenship and a more dangerous, more uncertain future has an obvious right answer.

A good read, give it a look.

QUOTE (Shryke @ Mar 2 2009, 14.15)

Adama declared it a military matter.

You act as if this should matter to the legitimately elected government that he just told to 'fuck off'. Because arbitrarily declaring 'Military!' is pretty much the equivalent of telling the government to fuck off. This is made worse by the fact that even Adama didn't think it was a military decision at first, since they sent this matter to the Quorum back when he thought they might side with him. When they had the audacity to contradict his will, than it suddenly became a military matter. He's saying about as transparently as possible that "Civilian Government is fine, so long as it doesn't dare disagree with me"

And Lee did not agree, as he was the one (if I recall correctly) who pushed for it to go to the Quorum. Face it, Lee compromised his own irritating self-righteousness when it was convenient to the plot.

QUOTE (Shryke @ Mar 2 2009, 14.32)

Also, your link is more "Blah Blah Blah They shouldn't forgive the Cylons"

Its a hell of alot more than that. It is further argument of what I've been saying all along, that the direction they're trying to take the series and the supposed moral dilemma's they insist on raising are simply not supported by the context they've created. I don't really see any room to dissent from this point. When it comes down to it, the Cylons committed genocide. They voted on it and at least 4 of the models (5 if you believe Cavil voting against it, since we now know he was its prime engineer) are 100% complicit in it. Any attempts to paint colonial objections to the Cylons as mere prejudice, which happens all the fucking time in the show, are simply ludicrous.

QUOTE (Shryke @ Mar 2 2009, 14.29)

Lee wanted to go to the Quorum because he, legitimately, felt that it would go MUCH easier if they had the cooperation of the ship captains. He never spoke out against the plan, just the execution of the plan.

Face it, your making shit up to try and create plotholes and inconsistencies.

The 'Lee' that the writers established over the last few seasons would have spoken out against the plan (or more specifically, the ignoring of the government and use of force to implement the plan) once it became clear that the legitimate civilian government unanimously (himself excepted) ruled against it. But that wasn't convenient for the plot, so they inserted yet another character inconsistency to serve that.

QUOTE (Shryke @ Mar 2 2009, 15.39)

But alot of those objections ARE prejudice. Because THE COLONIALS NEED THE CYLONS TO SURVIVE. And, as shown in the mutiny by Narcho, many of the Colonials hate the Cylons so much that they aren't willing to cooperate with them even to save the Fleet. They aren't willing to believe the Cylons are on their side now and because of that aren't willing to work with them despite it being their only chance.

The whole direction we're going in now is perfectly supported by the show, because the show has beaten down BOTH sides now to the point where neither can survive without the other. It's thrown them into a situation where, despite the past and their hatred of one another, cooperation is the only chance for survival.

Basically, your premise seems to be that the Colonials should march head first into extinction rather then cooperate with their former enemies.

Hardly, I've been saying since day one that the only valid argument for cooperation with the Cylons is necessity. And survival surely falls under that. My objection is the depiction of the 'other side' of the argument as narrow-minded bigots fueled by unjustified hatred and little else, which happens far too often. There were countless legitimate objections to the Cylon jump drives that could have been made by the opposition, from several examples of the Cylons proven deceitfulness to just how necessary (or not) it is to limiting the concessions to something less objectionable (aka, no citizenship or something of the like)...they were not made. Gaeta could have read a laundry list of offenses off to Adama during his impromptu trial that could have made an infinitely better case for the righteousness of his mutiny and exposed Adama's own rampant hypocrisy, but he did nothing of the sort.

There is a clear pattern of the writers ignoring inconvenient realities just in case we might actually doubt whose supposed to be the villains (or at least misguided and naive fools) and the heroes. The 'best cases' for the other side are never made. Rarely are they even allowed to make marginally good cases, even when they're rather obvious and easy to make. What we're left with are strawmen essentially. Perhaps not as badly drawn as Goodkind's, but still fucking scarecrows one and all.

QUOTE (Bronn Stone @ Mar 2 2009, 16.18)

Yet if he chose the latter, you, Hal Duncan and Neil would condemn him as equally as those who actively and eagerly pushed through the genocide. Yet I'd say he has no more individual guilt than the Wehrmacht soldier Duncan alludes to. He fought with all the power left to him to force change until he could no longer stop it. And his 'voting along with his model' was the only choice if he were not going to commit treason against his society.

Even if your scenario is true, they're still a hell of alot more guilty than the individual Wehrmacht soldier. Unlike the NAZI's, they did have a referendum on genocide. Unlike the individual soldier, they cannot hide behind ignorance, real or self-deluded. They fully understood the enormity of the crime they were about to commit. And a majority voted for it. Further, there are certain acts for which no amount of appeals to cultural harmony and unity really matter worth a damn. They were voting to eliminate a species. If it was fiercely debated within your subset of society, but 51% managed to vote in favor, you don't give your symbolic unity vote simply because that's tradition. That almost makes you worse than the fiercest advocates of mass murder. Because while they may be evil, you're knowingly letting great evil happen without so much as a symbolic gesture of dissent. And its not like they're doing so out of fear of a secret police destroying them, Cylon and Cylon violence was almost unheard of before their civil war. So even if your scenario plays out, there was a vote for genocide and those opposed within "Yes" model numbers said and did nothing.

In either case, if there was this internal dissent that you speak of, it seems unlikely that we would not have heard of it yet.

And if we're really supposed to buy that they're not the collectively evil murderous bitches that all the evidence suggests, you'd think there might be one or two who dissented enough to actually take action against this plan. Say "fuck my own species of butchers" and go warn humanity. Surely if this was a society of free thinking individuals someone amongst the multitude of millions would've taken that path. So far as we know, noone did.

QUOTE (Shryke @ Mar 2 2009, 17.10)

The argument against cooperation is literally just "We fucking hate the Cylons.". And it's perfectly legitimate to hate their guts. Even Adama does. When has it been shown to be not a legitimate grievance?

That's the argument because the writers have ignored all context and scripted it that way. They rarely delve into the innumerable reasons for that hatred when said 'haters' are expressing it. It is almost always presented as unjustified bigotry and prejudice, which is utter horseshit. There's an easy case to be made for their hatred, but the writers almost always avoid making it. Doesn't mesh with their inapplicable 'real world parallels'.

QUOTE (Bronn Stone @ Mar 2 2009, 17.10)

Voting against your model is considered akin to treason in their society and treason is subject to the greatest penalty they can impose. Your position is neither reasonable nor logical. You expect others to make pointless and futile gestures of defiance only because you are so fond of them yourself.

Where is the evidence of this?

QUOTE (Relic @ Mar 4 2009, 20.22)

oh, haha. well for what its worth i read Ran's posts and didn't feel like mine was a personal attack of any sorts =)

anyway, back to how hot Starbuck is...

I still prefer Boomer.

QUOTE (Relic @ Mar 4 2009, 20.44)

id like to see that show down. Emo Starbuck vs. Jealous Boomer

If they could add some jello and white T-shirts, they might just have their highest rated episode ever.

So...considering we just had a mutiny over Cylon warp drives, why wasn't there any unrest over Adama leading a suicide mission loaded with indispensable military (and I'm sure some civilian) personnel to save a single cylon half breed? Maybe I'm on crack here, but this sort of strikes me as a waste of a shitload of essential resources. I can buy Adama being convinced its necessary, its within his character to buy prophetic gibberish even though he constantly claims otherwise.

But what about the other few thousand people on Galactica who didn't hear Ander's amazingly profound answer? (so profound they didn't show it to us lest we might conclude that its not convincing enough) Or the ones who haven't been privy to all the inside history/prophecy of humans and cylons being doomed to slaughter eachother until they blend the species, thereby making Hera's rescue the single most important thing right now. Or those who are privy, but possessing a healthy dose of skepticism and reality, don't buy that hokey mystical prophecy bullshit?

Yeah you can say they volunteered, but this is a fleet that banned the personal choice of abortion for the 'good of the species'. They're more than willing to set aside personal freedom to serve the common interests. And keeping about half the skilled pilots, mechanics, marines, commanders, engineers, etc alive and away from pointless suicide missions to rescue a single kid just strikes me as being in the species's interests.

It'd be one thing if they actually tried to sell this horseshit, but they didn't. They spent all that time on Lee hitting birds with brooms and Kara playing piano. Instead Adama put on his gruff, gravely voice and everyone went along with it. Not a single note of disapproval. Not a single objection voiced. I find this all a tad ridiculous.

QUOTE (Mack Kilimaro @ Mar 14 2009, 12.54)

I wouldn't say "everyone" went along with it. That deck was packed equally on each side before Adama made his "red line" comment, and I'd say there were 2-3 times as many people on the "stay behind" side as there were on the "volunteer" side. I thought that was pretty well done. Wasn't a lot of bullshit, just people making their choice. Sure, the only real people we care about who are staying behind are Baltar and Co. and Cottle (and him only because Adama made him), but from a numbers standpoint, that was clearly the larger group.

Kind of missed the thrust of the criticism. I'm not talking about people choosing or not choosing to personally go on the suicide mission. I'm talking about noone raising an objection to taking a third of Galactica off on a suicide mission to rescue one individual in the first place. Noone bitched. Noone objected. Noone said 'What the fuck are you thinking you psychotic old man?' Personally I find this to be more extreme than Cylon jump drives and if people were willing to mutiny over that, there should be some dissension from this. Choosing not to volunteer is not real dissent. There should have been some objections to any mission at all that would effectively (likely) kill so many essential members of humanity. By actually taking Adama up on his 'cross the line' bullshit in the first place, no matter which side they walked to, they essentially did 'go along with it'.

They could have sold the military necessity of this. Its not like they didn't have any filler the last several episodes that they could have devoted to making the case on screen. They chose not to. And really, the whole show and the whole finale suffers because of it. This is Heroes level ridiculous.

QUOTE (Yerman @ Mar 14 2009, 14.23)

OK, so my eyes attempts to dodge spoilers left and right aside, I have a question, if ye don't mind:

I've heard a lot about how good this show is, but I've also heard the first 2 seasons are meh. Would I be missing out on a lot of important stuff plot wise if I just started mid-series?

For about the first season and a half it was in the running for best sci-fi show ever. From the halfway point of season 2 they started adding a couple awful filler episodes. Season 3 was loaded with awful plotlines, rampant character stupidity, and its share of meandering. Both season 3 and 4 suffered from a lack of clear direction, very little internal inconsistency, and some weak writing. 4 still was an improvement over 3. And season 5 has been more good than bad.

Even during its weakest seasons there were moments of brilliance. Some really strong episodes or storylines. But it hasn't been consistently great since its early seasons. It is a show worth watching on the whole but there are some stretches that will try your patience.