Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

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Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Themightytom »

http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/watch_w ... estar.html
Battlestar Galactica and Caprica series masterminds Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Jane Espenson, and BSGverse stars Edward James Olmos, Esai Morales (plus, surprise guest Grace Park!), gathered at Comic-Con this morning to share some great news with fans about the prospects for more of the critically acclaimed sci-fi saga.

Want to hear Edward James Olmos' pitch for the next Battlestar Galactica movie?

Wanna know when Caprica is finally premiering on your TV after a years-long gestation?

Or would you care to hear how Caprica is catnip for the Buffy fans of the world? Read on...

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

Jane Espenson called her script for the Battlestar Galactica continuation film The Plan "a puzzle," because it retells much of the BSG mythology from the Cylon point of view, strictly adhering to the canonical timeline while still telling an entertaining, darkly humorous tale. In a nutshell, said Espenson, we fans can expect The Plan to be about "What happened on the other side of that door after she walks through." The Plan director Edward James Olmos, meanwhile, said simply, "You will freak out."

For now, Edward James Olmos just wants you BSG fans to buy The Plan on Blu-ray when it comes out on Oct. 27 (Eddie's really into Blu-ray for some reason), but he also insisted, "I can guarantee you this will not be the last movie on Battlestar Galactica." And what might that movie be about? Well, one fan wanted to know if Olmos had thought out about what happened to Adm. Bill Adama after the close of the series, and Olmos told us, "I've actually written an entire script already on exactly what happened to him. Let me put it to you this way: When you next see Adama, he will be in a rustic log cabin, and there will be a knock on the door. And it will be his old friend Col. Tigh saying, 'We have a problem.' And that's how the journey begins."

Caprica

The best Caprica news out of the panel is that the series finally has a launch date! Set your TiVos for Friday, Jan. 22, 2010 for the broadcast premiere, which will include cuts for TV (fewer boobies) as well as some new footage not seen on the DVD.

And for those of us who are already Caprica fans, thanks to the movie released on DVD earlier this year, executive producers Eick, Moore and Espenson provided a little color to Comic-Con attendees, sketching out the political and aesthestic world we'll be stepping into when the series launches. According to Jane, Eick and RDM, Caprica the series is set before the unification of the Twelve Colonies, so there will be a lot of detail about the sometimes warring cultures of those planets. (In case you're not up on your Battlestar Galactica backstory, the human-populated Twelve Colonies were all but destroyed at the beginning of the series by the genocidal Cylons.)

So this spinoff is a prequel of sorts, rather than a sequel, and according to Moore, "We wanted it to feel like a period piece, because it is a period piece within the Galactica setting. It's set 58 years prior to BSG. And we wanted to communicate different cultural identities...The Taurons are more overtly 1940s. There are hats and ties and cigarettes." Or as Espenson explained, "It's also before the political unification of the colonies, so there's more sense that we can differentiate people from the colonies by dress and tattoos and culture."

Eick shared that there are other visual differences between Galactica and Caprica: "Photographically it's not as wild or as vérité. We're making a comment that this is before the fall of Rome, so it's not as visually chaotic. It's a little bit more elegant, a little bit more subtle." Still in the midst of that serenity and beauty, there are the seeds of disaster. Eick said, "There are tensions and discriminations and biases. There's a certain racist thread that runs through the relationships in terms of Taurons and Capricans. We're definitely trading on some of those more allegorical social issues like we did on Battlestar."

By the way, Jane Espenson (who wrote on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then Battlestar Galactica and who will be the Caprica show runner) wants you Joss Whedon acolytes to know that they should consider watching Caprica. "There's a little tiny essence of Buffy in this. We've got an angry teenage girl and a robot." Nice.
I'm pretty sure we HAVE seen the last of the galactica (Unless it somehow MISSED the sun, or if they pull a gundham style copout and it hasn't made it there yet) But the real question is:

Have We Seen The Last of Bill Adama's Mustache?

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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Crossroads Inc. »

I've said it before and I'll say it again, if they want some good stories an fun, they need to do the Cylon war itself!
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

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Crossroads Inc. wrote:I've said it before and I'll say it again, if they want some good stories an fun, they need to do the Cylon war itself!

I know right? Its the white elephant in the room

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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Darksider »

Please remember that this is the guy who gave us the nuclear annihilation of the colonies largely via radio broadcast.

A war series isn't something RDM would be able to do well. You'd hear about half the major battles via other characters talking and the series would focus on grimdark soap opera drama bullshit.

Also, I know i'll get flamed for this, but I've never been that taken with Neo-BSG's space battles. The spastic camera angles make it difficult to follow, and the audio interaction consists of barely audible music and dulled sound effects. I'll take the Battle of Endor or any of the major battles from B5 or Stargate over Neo-BSG any day of the week.
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Uraniun235 »

Okay, Darksider, some of that stuff is old material. Really old material. Like "the miniseries came out and OH NO STARBUCK IS A WOMAN" old. Really, we're still bitching about "Columbia just got destroyed! It came over the wireless!"? Because I would think we'd at least have progressed on to "man why did everyone have to think 'OH MAN WE'RE DOING SOMETHING ABOUT 9/11, THIS RELEVANCE WILL SURELY MAKE A BETTER STORY', this would have been better if they just did their own thing", but this is rambling off into basic grumbling.


If you really want to make an incisive remark about the ability of RONALD D. MOORE to tell a war story, let's go by his actual record - out of two "war series" he's done so far (which, by the way, calling DS9 a "war series" is a bit of a lol in its own way, but that's a tangent) both of them have resorted to egregious deus ex machina devices in order to yank the show out of the corner they wrote themselves into.

It's not like a series would be that revealing anyway. We already know half the plots already: Cylons employ magic hacking technology to remote in and subvert Colonial fleet systems, starring cast must work against the clock to slap together a workaround so that they can fight on despite the magic hacking technology, alcoholic misfits get angry at each other and get into big feuds, then (almost) everyone comes together for the Big Win. Mix in some Profound Musings about Human Nature and *bam* look at me I just wrote a hit series.


As for the space battles, eh, it depends, some of them are good, some of them aren't. They're still way better than anything DS9 gave us; I can't speak for Stargate (although from what little I saw, the starship designs there didn't really appeal to me all that much), but B5 had some pretty lame battles too, and comparing anything to the Battle of Endor will almost surely bring disappointment.


Also lol at Jane Espenson trolling for ratings from Whedon fans. That's not a statement I would associate with a quality series but then I guess my standards for quality television are slightly higher than "hot angry teenage girl".
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Themightytom »

RDM does have "Write myself into a corner" syndrome, but for once that shouldn't be a problem here, HE ALREADY WROTE THE ENDING. Cylons surrender, wars over, they disappear. All he has to do is fill in the gaps, and as he is REALLY REALLY good at worldbuilding, at least in nBSG's case, a story about the cylon war would just let him shine in terms of creating and developing liekable cahracters. I don't think anyone wants to see a series of battleporn, myself i am just interested in the portrayal of the Colonial military. their procedures alone are intriguing, their interactions are prettty believable (Albeit dark) and the first cylon war would be fairly straightforward in terms of morality (Oops we made killer robots, they are trying to kill us now).

Stargate had some decent battles, especially as Atlantis progressed (The Daedalous variations anybody?) but visually speaking I preferred B5 and nBSG. Nothing like a multi capship clusterfuck to get things moving.

I am mildly concerned by EDO's comments about The Plan. I don't WANT to be jerked around even more, i ahd enough of taht with the final five cylons, the rip off opera house scene Starbuck dissappearing and "LOLZ We Call THIS Erth!"

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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by CaptainChewbacca »

I'd watch an Adama-tigh on pre-historic earth movie. It'd fucking ROCK!
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by RedImperator »

RDM does have "Write myself into a corner" syndrome, but for once that shouldn't be a problem here, HE ALREADY WROTE THE ENDING
Ha! Yeah right. The worst jams a writer can get into come when you have an ending set in stone and you've meandered down some dead-end path with no way to get there.
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Vympel »

The ending RDM wrote was stupid. Whether he wrote it way before or pulled it out of his ass is immaterial. It made not the slightest lick of sense.

What should've happened is the Cylons and Humans get together and create a new colony on the new Earth and everyone lives happily ever after in an equitable fusion of human and cylon society, just like the show was trying to say with its 'break the cycle' thing that they fumbled so fucking badly in the finale with their "lets commit cultural and civilizational suicide by voluntary luddism" bollocks.

(and yes, this would make it an AU from our own. Who cares.)
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Stofsk »

Exactly. I never liked how in the second half of season 4 the 'Earth' they found was so radioactive that they couldn't live on it, in spite of the fact it got nuked millennia ago, but nothing could be as stupid as finding Real Earth and deciding to break apart their society completely by first, scattering everybody all over the planet (to 'increase the chances of survival') and then launching all their technology and ships into the sun (which, what, wouldn't decrease everybody's chances of survival?).

Oh well. Who knew it would end that badly?
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by loomer »

CaptainChewbacca wrote:I'd watch an Adama-tigh on pre-historic earth movie. It'd fucking ROCK!
Damn right it would. We've seen Tigh fuck up Cylons and humans with rifles, we've even seen him beat a far younger, stronger man into submission with a pipe without breaking a sweat. Now the only thing that could top that is within reach.

Yes, I want to see Tigh kill a mammoth with a stick.
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Themightytom »

loomer wrote:
CaptainChewbacca wrote:I'd watch an Adama-tigh on pre-historic earth movie. It'd fucking ROCK!
Damn right it would. We've seen Tigh fuck up Cylons and humans with rifles, we've even seen him beat a far younger, stronger man into submission with a pipe without breaking a sweat. Now the only thing that could top that is within reach.

Yes, I want to see Tigh kill a mammoth with a stick.
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Uraniun235 »

Vympel wrote: (and yes, this would make it an AU from our own. Who cares.)
It seemed like every time I brought up an AU hypothesis around here, to reconcile the RDM quote that he kept the "life here began out there" idea from BSG79, there were like half a dozen guys going rabid about how it "doesn't make sense" or some such bollocks.

So, maybe more people than you might think.

(But they don't matter. :))
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Stofsk »

I think I may have been one of them. Boy, am I eating my words now. :)
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Crossroads Inc. »

Vympel wrote:The ending RDM wrote was stupid. Whether he wrote it way before or pulled it out of his ass is immaterial. It made not the slightest lick of sense.

What should've happened is the Cylons and Humans get together and create a new colony on the new Earth and everyone lives happily ever after in an equitable fusion of human and cylon society, just like the show was trying to say with its 'break the cycle' thing that they fumbled so fucking badly in the finale with their "lets commit cultural and civilizational suicide by voluntary luddism" bollocks.

(and yes, this would make it an AU from our own. Who cares.)
There are over 40 pages worth of discussion that eventually got HOS'ed about just how stupid the ending was. From interviews RDM was so hot to tie BSG and Hera into being "Mitoclorian Even" that he kicked all the rest of the lore, set up and history of BSG down the crapper.

II do find it fun just how many people, before the end of the show, were going nuts saying how BSG would HAVE to tie into our Earth some how. And once they saw how it was done, with their starships dumped in the sun, and the survivers commiting cultural suicide, well, be careful what you wish for.
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Themightytom »

...Mitochondrial Eve?

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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Samuel »

Themightytom wrote:...Mitochondrial Eve?
If you trace back the Mitochondrial linage (which is only passed down by the mother) it eventually reaches a point. That person is the Mitochondrial Eve.
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Nephtys »

Basically, ZOMG Hera's UNIQUE ULTIMATE DESTINY was that she would eventually be the ancestor of a lot of people. Um. Okay.

It essentially went 'Well, that was a fun show, wasn't it? Oh. It's pretty much all inconsequential.'
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Uraniun235 »

Stofsk wrote:I think I may have been one of them. Boy, am I eating my words now. :)
I don't think you were that bad, there were at least a couple of people who seemed to be incapable of wrapping their minds around the concept.


The most hilarious part was when someone got angry at me for basically posting "a wizard god did it, lol", and posted a big angry paragraph at me about "advanced civilizations" which basically boiled down to "a wizard god a wizard did it, lol"
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Beowulf »

Nephtys wrote:Basically, ZOMG Hera's UNIQUE ULTIMATE DESTINY was that she would eventually be the ancestor of a lot of people. Um. Okay.

It essentially went 'Well, that was a fun show, wasn't it? Oh. It's pretty much all inconsequential.'
And of course, given there was alot more Eights than Hera, and one Eight was Hera's mother, it's actually much more probable that Eight was Mitochondrial Eve (or even worse, the cylons all had mitochondria from Ellen, making it really Ellen that was Mitochondrial Eve!)
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Themightytom »

Samuel wrote:
Themightytom wrote:...Mitochondrial Eve?
If you trace back the Mitochondrial linage (which is only passed down by the mother) it eventually reaches a point. That person is the Mitochondrial Eve.
so no mitochlorians and no even ness. Thanks for clarifying.

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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Stuart Mackey »

CaptainChewbacca wrote:I'd watch an Adama-tigh on pre-historic earth movie. It'd fucking ROCK!
What would they do ?chuck stone tipped spears at hostile Cro' Mags (they have a plan)to the rousing sound of melodramatic music?
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Vympel »

First they'd get aggressively drunk on the alcohol they abandoned (can you imagine anything more absurd?) and rant and rave at each other for a scene or two, perhaps even beating the shit out of each other. :)
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Stofsk »

Vympel wrote:First they'd get aggressively drunk on the alcohol they abandoned (can you imagine anything more absurd?) and rant and rave at each other for a scene or two, perhaps even beating the shit out of each other. :)
Don't forget EJO vomiting on himself, for the pathos.
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Re: Have we seen the last of Battlestar galactica?

Post by Battlehymn Republic »

The ending to BSG is worse than Matrix Revolutions.
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