BSG Reactica
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They didn’t have a plan. “They” being the writers. The Director admitted as much in one of the Director commentaries for the first season in the DVD set, and the moment I heard it I lost all interest in the series. Babylon 5 had established how one pulls off a well-planned sci-fi series a decade prior, and that numbskull thought he knew better.
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@Ominous said in BSG Reactica:
They didn’t have a plan. “They” being the writers. The Director admitted as much in one of the Director commentaries for the first season in the DVD set, and the moment I heard it I lost all interest in the series. Babylon 5 had established how one pulls off a well-planned sci-fi series a decade prior, and that numbskull thought he knew better.
B5 is always, always, always my comparison point for shows that just completely shit the bed on pulling together the mystery that they’ve been dragging out for however many seasons. It got messy towards the end because they were cancelled and then uncancelled, so rushed through the ending of all the main arcs in Season 4 and then built Season 5 largely out of things that were supposed to be hinted at… but that was network fuckery. Not the writers. Otherwise, it would’ve been about as close to perfect as a show with '90s costuming and the same repeating shots CGI visuals can possibly be.
And writing a show with central mystery works the same way as designing a game with a central mystery. You don’t have to know all the details right away. They can stretch and grow and shift with time. But you absolutely have to know the answers to the Big Question going in. It makes everything else consistent and solves plot problems more often than you’d think when you can go, “Does this contradict the Big Answer? If it breaks the Big Answer, it doesn’t belong in our story.”
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@Aria Yes, B5 was the best.
IMHO BSG fell into the same “Mystery Box Storytelling” pit that Lost did at around the same timeframe. Set up a mystery, and hope you can come up with a satisfying resolution by the time it matters. The trouble is that’s NEVER been how satisfying mysteries work. Seat-of-your-pants storytelling has its place, but not in a mystery. @Jennkryst is exactly right about how that wrecked the plot. They painted themselves into such a corner that the only way out was divine intervention.
BUT I still love the show. Low-tech sci-fi military stuff is my jam. The characters are great. The writing in any individual episode is usually stellar, especially in the early seasons.
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@Faraday Eh, BSG had religious themes from the jump, I think it was more of an issue that they did the miniseries without knowing that they would get a show, and then didn’t know they would be renewed each season.
S2 was announced before S1 aired, but S3 wasn’t announced until S2 finished. Ditto S4, which was announced as the final season in the summer of 2007, after S3 aired, but before the Writer’s Strike (which is proooobably what led to the year hiatus during the mid-season finale of S4).
I’m not going to say that it wrecked the plot. BSG certainly wasn’t as zany as Lost (which jumped the shark because ABC wanted to turn Lost into a Greys Anatomy 20 season bonanza and refused to actually allow them an end-date. The writers DID know where they wanted to end up going, but the goal kept getting pushed back - see Billiam’s 28.4 hour 5-part deept dive into Lost
Anyway TLDR; if you want to mysterybox TV, you gotta know what you want from the start, and you need to make sure the executives give you the number of seasons to get there in the end, which is a problem because capitalism hates art, etc and so on.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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@Jennkryst for me, there’s a big difference between “religious themes” and literal on-camera angels. I also think some of the giant plot holes you pointed out were theme-breaking. But of course reasonable people can disagree on such things, and none of that stopped me from enjoying the show. i just would have enjoyed it even more (probably in the same storytelling tier as B5) if they’d had a better plan from the start.
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@Faraday Yeah, but it’s not like they waited until the last couple of episodes to go ‘Oh Wow, Angels!’ Head Six was around from the Miniseries, Head Baltar is revealed in… uh… somewhere in Season 2. So I still wouldn’t say ‘the only way out of the corner was divine intervention’… the divine intervention was baked in from the start.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst I don’t believe that’s accurate. The writers didn’t have a plan for Head Six. She was a Mystery Box because they thought it was cool. Even in a recent interview, RDM was still insisting that the final season writers’ room didn’t want to come out and call them “angels” because they didn’t want to put a name on it and kill the mystery.
There was a copy of the original BSG series bible floating around the internet years ago. Some relevant snippets:
Our show is built on the idea that a science fiction series can employ ground-breaking special effects, dynamic cinematography, realistic situations, believable characters and explore contemporary social and political issues without sacrificing dramatic tension or excitement.
(Our new) approach is to introduce realism into what has heretofore been an aggressively unrealistic genre.
We will eschew the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil twins, God-like powers and all the other cliches of the genre.
My favorite aspects of the series were the things mentioned above. The fact that they extinguish the fire in the pod by venting it to space. The running count of people left alive in the fleet. The time they spend worrying about supplies. The commentary on social issues and moral dilemmas. Even most of Head Six’s original shenanigans could be attributed just to Baltar being insane (like when he points to the place they should strike on that one moon and then Six attributes it to “God guiding his hand”; they deliberately left it vague enough that maybe he just got lucky.)
So yes, quite clearly they ENDED UP where you describe, but I think there’s a ton of evidence that this was something they backed themselves into, and not a clear plan from the start.
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She and Tricia Helfer already did a watch and react podcast. I’m not sure why she’s doing another one.
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@InkGolem Do you mean the podcast Tricia Helfer did with Marc Bernardin?
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@Pavel There was one with Tricia Helfer and Kater Sackoff called Battlestar Galacticast. Unless I am gravely misremembering?
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@InkGolem Yeah, that’s the one to which I was referring. Sackoff was in a couple of episodes as a guest, but she didn’t host it. (At least according to the information I found while googling. I didn’t actually listen to the podcast when it aired.)
Apparently this podcast is her first time watching it all the way through.
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@Pavel Okay, so I didn’t invent her presence on that one whole cloth. Whew.
Going to have to check this out.
