big hoos & owenf watch 'battlestar galactica' and no one talks abt eps they haven't seen yet

i kind of feel bad for owenf for like steam-train-carrying-on, sorry bro

just reached the break in season 4. had forgotten the planet of the apes ending.

hey don't work hoos, I'm going to have a mammoth catch up soon. Work based stuff has totally taken over and I couldn't devote anywhere near enough time or attention without feeling guilty.

oh, i finished this last night. also watched the 8 minute overview, which shed some light on things.

gave up on caprica btw, so boring

can't believe people saying mean stuff about Scar on here. best episode! made me cry a little :(

WORST

no way it ruled how can you not be moved by starbuck's toast to the fallen OH YES SHE REMEMBERED THEIR NAMES THEY ARE TATTOOED ON HER HEART!!!!

I thought scar was super fun

not as bad as the black market one, but . . .

i'm making a list now...

it was so scary!

I really just disliked Kat.

But that ended well for me.

so uh is it generally considered that this show has the worst finale of any "respected" TV drama from the last decade? marathonned this over the past week and a half and enjoyed much of it, but holy shit that was bad

So you've never heard of Lost?

I still like the ending.

mh--very good point. (I've only watched the first season of Lost to be honest)

Lost and Sopranos ending far more controversial/hated. This one was just disappointing, but at least there were two weaker theologically-fixated seasons setting you up for disappointment.

end of BSG was realizing that Ron Moore & co were only incrementally better than his ex-coworker Brannon Braga & co and they're all nerds

end of LOST was like someone shitting in your mouth

I apologize for this vivid image but I felt that it was really bad.

Lost and Sopranos ending far more controversial/hated

Sopranos ending is perhaps the best ending of any show in TV history

tbf he said controversial

I know I just get kind of AlexinNYC "honor the fire" about the Sopranos

surely most people have come around on the Sopranos ending anyway

at least The Sopranos were anticlimatic in its very nature

yeah wtf the Sopranos ending is the best, only one that comes close is The Shield

we should poll best tv endings ever (Newhart, Sopranos, Seinfeld, M*A*S*H* etc)

but as to the two preceding seasons, yeah they were weaker but there was still the occasional worthwhile episode there--the New Caprica stuff was great and perhaps from a better series, season 3 finale was pretty good. tbh the only part of 4.5 I thought was any good was the brief mutiny arc

also i know it's a dead horse but the use of "all along the watchtower" is the corniest shit ever, and that's even before ron moore's fear of what his roomba might do

(xp, although yes there should really be a poll)

tbh the only part of 4.5 I thought was any good was the brief mutiny arc

I agree - but even this was diminishing returns/rehash of previous storyline

My feeling is BSG started as a really good sci-fi show (with sometimes clumsy/sometimes effective overlays of Bush-era topicality) and got mired in increasingly nutty Mormon mysticism. (I know Mormon allegory was the starting point for the series, but the more that became the storyline, the lamer the whole thing got.)

Ron Moore is mormon? OG series had way more mormon shit in it, everything in the new one just seemed to be allusions to that afaict

Glen Larson, creator and producer of the first show, is a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints. He based much of the first series on Mormon cosmology. Was there a concerted effort to move away from that in this version?

Moore: Not specifically, no. I looked at the original series as mythos and the way it dealt with religion as sort of a global sense. I was aware that Glen had used Mormon influences and how he had created the cosmology, but I'm not that familiar with Mormon belief or practice.

The BSG finale was better than I expected, given how bad season 3 and 4 were. The action-y moments were good, pretty tense. The very end was incredibly stupid, no two ways about that.

xp

Yeah, but like he says there, it's pretty much in the DNA for it to have this mystical side(however Mormon it may be). Which was my least-favorite thing about it from the start, and it ended up sort of swallowing the series whole.

the half-assed mysticism definitely destroyed the show. I think the problem was that a bunch of good ideas were introduced at the outset without any real understanding of their implications, and then as the show went on and they realized they weren't going to get cancelled, they got buried under the weight of trying to make up explanations for things that had originally just been tossed off.

cylons being monotheistic, for example.

I just recently watched BSG 1/2 in the last week and a half. It became an obsession and drove my family mad, me watching four plus episodes a day. I couldn't believe how ridiculous the Baltar/Caprica 6 scenes seemed at first and how haunting and hypnotic they became as the series drew me in. A+ for the first two seasons.

Cylons and their creepy sex fantasies and mating with humans, that had a few unexplored angles

we should poll best tv endings ever (Newhart, Sopranos, Seinfeld, M*A*S*H* etc)

― If I was a carpenter, and you were a douchebag (Shakey Mo Collier)

Should probably wait for Breaking Bad to finish before conducting such a poll.

blackadders always ended well

Died/died/became king by mistake/died

exactly

mookie otm

Lost and Sopranos ending far more controversial/hated. This one was just disappointing

i was not disappointed, i wanted to kick the ending into a burning house and then set it on fire fifty more times and then at least chase ron moore around with a torch, not sure where i'd go from there but i think it'd be a fun day

also tbh i didn't mind lost's ending cause they just forced themselves into so many corners and none of it surprised me and at least it had its moments (vincent), where BSG's entire last season is just FUCK IT LET'S DO ALL OF OUR IDEAS CAUSE WE'RE SHINY SHOOTING STARS

I just finished watching Deep Space 9 (for which Ronald Moore also did a lot of scripts, though Ira Behr and Robert Wolfe were the most important writers), and I guess if there's a lesson to be learned it's that you shouldn't bring theology into sci-fi?

(WARNING! SOME MAJOR SPOILERS FOR DS9 WILL FOLLOW!)

I mean, the basic concept of god/gods in a fairly realistic sci-fi setting can lead to interesting directions, but if in the end it all boils down "it was god's plan all along", or "good gods defeat evil gods", then that's just pointlessly simplistic and stupid. Thankfully in DS9 this was never the most important plotline, and its gods were at least given a sort of a mundane explanation, so the theological bits didn't ruin the whole series like they did with BSG.

Anyway, having watched DS9 after BSG, it's pretty interesting to spot the similarities. (I think Ron Moore brought some other DS9 writers too to BSG alongside him?) Besides the "god in space" thing there's a lot of similar themes in them:

* You have the idea of standing alone against a much bigger force whose moralities you cannot understand;
* the paranoia of not knowing whether the enemy is among us;
* a member of the enemy race working for the good guys without even knowing s/he's a part of that race, and when s/he does find out, that forces him/her to choose where his/her loyalty lies;
* the idea of terrorists being the good guys, while the series still questions the morality of terrorism;
* a biological weapon that can destroy the whole enemy race, and the question whether or not its genocide to do that in a situation where your survival is at stake;
* both series also end with a reconciliation between the two warring races rather than the other totally defeating the other.

In retrospect BSG almost feels like Moore took the best ideas from DS9 and ran with them without the constraints set by the Star Trek universe and the Star Trek ethos. OTOH, maybe those constraints were actually a good thing, because DS9 never went indulgent and insane like BSG did, so in the end it was the better series.

"I guess if there's a lesson to be learned from BSG and DS9"

I like that it was pretty clear that the wormhole aliens were never actually gods, but just a non-corporeal species that the Bajorans thought controlled everything. Stupid Bajorans.

Overall, definitely better than BSG, but I'm biased towards it, it's one of my favorite TV series ever.