Battlestar Galactica Gets Spinoff Prequel Series 297
It was recently announced that sci-fi remake series Battlestar Galactica is getting a whole new spinoff prequel series called "Caprica." Signed on for twenty hours worth of finished product, including a two-hour pilot, the new series is to be set 50 years prior to Battlestar Galactica, and will focus on two rival families, the Graystones and the Adamas. "Enmeshed in the burgeoning technology of artificial intelligence and robotics that will eventually lead to the creation of the Cylons, the two houses go toe-to-toe blending action with corporate conspiracy and sexual politics. 'Caprica' will deliver all of the passion, intrigue, political backbiting and family conflict in television's first science fiction family saga."
Recently announced? (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember 1980 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Remember 1980 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So... (Score:3, Interesting)
They already said there will be less spaceships -- thus, motorcycles is the way to go!
Seriously though, hopefully the writing quality of this is superior to the remake of Battlestar. In that it has far fewer gaping plotholes and some sense of forward momentum. I gave up with this show during the hendrix jumping the shark moment. The scripts had poor dramatic tension up to that point, but hendrix was the final straw.
I've seen this before... (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if it's going to be as good as when it was the Harkonnens and the Atreideses.
Re:How faithful to the 1970s series will it be? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ever notice how the Enterprise in Enterprise looked way more advanced that the Enterprise in Star Trek.
It got to be embarrassing. The original Star Trek bridge now looks like an outdated comm center for mall security.
The original Battlestar Galactica bridge from the 1970s was powered by Tektronix, and many of the controls actually did something visible. This was a real problem for the actors, who had to learn how to operate the systems.
"2001" was more futuristic. An AI took care of the details, and the crew just chatted with the AI.
Re:Recently announced? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I even thought I saw a trailer for the series as much as a year ago.
As I recall, it was entirely impossible to tell from watching the trailer that it was in any way related to BSG, aside from the title. Looked boring.
Re:Late in the game (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets not even get into what FOX did to Firefly...
Clueless Network (Score:4, Interesting)
"One of the network's frustrations with [Battlestar Galactica] has been its dark and increasingly complex mythology."
If *that's* why the network was frustrated by the show, then the network is run by morons. The dark, complicated mythology is part of what made the show so good. Multidimensional characters with complex motivations were a great added bonus to high quality, space-based visual effects.
The frustrations that *should* have been keeping network executives up at night involved huge downtime between seasons. That, above all else, is what caused viewership to decline. People simply lost interest in a show that appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be canceled every year. People were actually surprised when the next season began, and had already decided to watch something else.
Granted, season 3 lost a lot of credibility when the space opera turned soap opera (that season sucked really bad), but the main problems came from scheduling mismanagement by the network.
Re:Remember 1980 (Score:3, Interesting)
It's easily one of the worst sci-fi shows I've ever the displeasure of watching.
Worse than the Star Wars Christmas Special?
Except Deep Space 9 had Babylon 5 to compete with (Score:2, Interesting)
When B5 got into its stride, DS9 got into the story arc business and largely out of the NG inherited planet of the week plot.
While not a classic series - how could it be with the incessant mood swings of Avery Brooks and almost everything involving Quark or Jake Sisko - it had some periods approaching greatness (Improbable Cause/The Die Is Cast, Call To Arms/A Time to Stand). But then Babylon 5 disappeared onto TNT and DS9's writers had several brain farts (such as Ezri Dax and Vic Fontaine) and that was that.
Who's going to keep Moore and Eick from making Caprica a Bionic Woman sized disaster?
They had to wait (Score:3, Interesting)
until the final five got revealed.
We will see human personalities downloaded into a human like Cylon after Zoe Graystone dies in a terrorist attack. Then Zoe-R will be the prototype for the human Cylons. 50 years before the fall of the Twelve Colonies.
The Adamas will most likely be opposed to the creation of the new Cylons and feud with the Graystones who created them, but they have Graystones involved in relationships with the Adamas to make it more complex.
Re:Late in the game (Score:3, Interesting)
HBO is all about pushing subscription sales. Yes they have really awesome shows, but unless they are "mainstream" enough to convince new subscribers it just isn't worth it for them. Deadwood and Rome were awesome, but they didn't have the same kind of audience appeal as Entourage and Sopranos where you're left out of the water cooler conversation on monday unless you have a subscription.
Re:So... (Score:2, Interesting)
To be fair - the version they played was the Hendrix version, and yes, for me that was also the shark-jumping moment.
Spoiler alert: If you haven't yet watched the end of season 3, skip the rest of my post. I've got some bitching to do that I'm not going to hold in for the sake of what I'm presuming is a very small subset of /.ers who care about BSG, but not enough to be caught up at this point.
It's bad enough that a few "people" are apparently hearing Dylan/Hendrix. Never mind that we're light-years away from 1960's Earth, and they're apparently not hearing it through radio waves since nobody else can detect it. I can understand some sort of "signal" waking up the last remaining Cylon models, maybe even a musical signal, but a song from earth?
But the identity of the 4 just pissed me off. Sam and What's-her-name, who even cares? I never did like Sam's character anyway, and Roslin's aide was never an interesting character until after she was revealed as a Cylon. Tyrol didn't really surprise me, though it does mean that his and Cally's baby is another "hybrid", meaning that Hera isn't quite as unique as most of the series has made her out to be. (The other obvious possibility is that Cally was cheating on Tyrol, and I'm surprised that possibility hasn't been dragged up and had the angst wrung out of it.)
But Tigh? What? An old guy with a well-established history from back before the first Cylon war? At what point was this skinjob planted? How can they possibly explain this?
I'll be honest, I thought the show had jumped the shark when they first landed on New Caprica, though they did eventually manage to redeem themselves. I didn't hate the Baltar trial as much as I thought I would, but Lee's involvement still annoys me. I really like the concept of dissension among the Cylons, particularly about whether the humans should be wiped out. But the whole "Final Five" frenzy just seemed to come out of nowhere, and then it's suddenly the main conflict in the show. The show as a whole has gotten worse, the scheduling and constant hiatuses make it hard to follow, and the constant inexplicable new plot elements make my head and stomach spin.
For all my complaints, when the show starts back up, I will likely keep watching. Partly out of a sheer stubbornness - I hate to quit. But partly to see if the writers can manage to resurrect anything coherent out of this mess. In other words, there had better be a damn good explanation for what's happened.
I saw this - man did it suck! (Score:4, Interesting)
I was walking through the mall connecting two Las Vegas hotels with my brother a few months ago when a someone asked if we have "a few minutes to watch a program". After signing up, we were in a room with two TV sets, holding a pair of buttons on cords - press the green one when you liked what you were seeing, the red one when you didn't. That red button got quite a work-out. After the sucking stopped (nearly an hour later!), we answered an electronic questionaire where we could explain why we thought it sucked, and in what ways. I took it as the opportunity to mention other non-dreadful SF programming like the new Doctor Who. In brief, I hated every character in this show and didn't much care for the actors playing the characters. If I ever see an episode of it again, it will be far too soon./pP
Comparing BSG with B5 (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is definitely true. I don't watch a lot of TV and I bought the first 3 seasons of BSG after a friend recommended it. I've enjoyed it, mostly for the drama, and I'll probably buy S4 when it's finally available just so I can see how it ends, but there have also been a lot of inconsistencies that I've found irritating or confusing.
This isn't exactly a new thing, though. It goes right back to the first season when we were shown that Cylons were clearly biologically different from humans (glowing read spine, etc), yet creating a "cylon detector" is such a difficult thing. I never really understood the whole Cylon Detector plot, which at the time seemed like an excuse to give Baltar something to do and create conflict with other characters. After seeing season 3, I now think that's probably exactly all that it was... lazy design of the details and hoping that things would make more sense later on. Baltar's a really fun character and it's interesting seeing him weasel his way around everything, but early on the character didn't really have much to work with so they just made up something empty.
I think the plot problems are because the writing team never really figured out any solid rules or boundaries or what would happen to begin with. The writing of the drama and character development is often pretty interesting and it's what keeps me watching the show, but the plots and details often seem as if they were just tied together to create an excuse to be able to have something fail or work as the writers want it to. As you've said (I think), it's like technobabble solving the problem, but with all the extra meaningless dialogue to go with it. Instead, they just let crazy and irrational details get in and don't even try to explain them.
If you compare BSG to something like Babylon 5, I think B5 would easily come out on top (at least for the first 4 seasons), despite having been one of the first series of its kind to actually experiment with a major story arc. B5 had all the strong drama and character development of BSG, but JMS also put so much effort into defining much of the relevant stuff about his universe to a needle's-width before he even produced the first episode. He knew what the rules were from the beginning, and 4-5 years in advance, he knew how all the main parts of his story would fit into the rules.