The truth about Battlestar Galactica and SciFi Channel - Page 2

elmir89 · 04-29-2007, 11:33 AM

BSG is a great show. the reason why it has changed so much is because the audience has grown up since TOS. also it has just been announced that s4 will have 22 episodes so i guess ratings weren't such a big deal. also with all the other problems that there are in the world i can't believe that you are wasting all your anger and sense of injustice on a TV show. love the show but can see it as that. a show.
ps RDM rocks!

wingsabre · 05-07-2007, 01:27 AM

yeah, it is just a show...

I do have a feeling that the 4th season will be the last, and if not, the 5th for sure will be. RDM has said that the series is not intended to go on forever and has a definite end, and that's when they find earth. There's not going to be a BSG 1980's re-imagined series, where they land on earth and find out that it's not really an advanced earth.

then when the series ends, those GENO whiners can go whine about something else, or they may become Dr. GENO, or: How they Learned to Stop Whining and Love the show.

Pitchy · 05-14-2007, 12:29 PM

I loved ToS as a kid... but I can honestly say that the new BSG is one of the best shows I have ever seen. It rivals Lost and Stargate SG-1 for shows that I am hopelessly addicted to.

Seriously though, it's almost as if this Spider guy gets paid to post bad PR or something. DUDE! get a life! It's just a TV show and I know it sucks that the new one is vastly superior to the one you love, but you are going to have to get over it.

Gartism · 05-15-2007, 07:30 AM

Pitchy's come to the Dark Side!

Yeah - we all love to bicker on this issue, but, honestly, Sci-Fi fans are THE TOUGHEST and MOST DEVOUT of all the fan bases.

Simon Pegg made some amazing jokes about Phantom Menace in Spaced because it was true. We all got it because we were all let down.

ToS was great, in its day, but the drama and depth of the new series is remarkable. If only they could have bridged the gap better (a la ST:TNG) this would be a non-issue. Either way, the new producers felt a re-boot was in order and went for it.

Who knows -- maybe we'll catch the old crew in a mirror world.

spiderr987 · 06-26-2007, 02:12 PM

"Edward James Olmos says he feels "terrible" about the cancellation."

"As for the fact that ratings are allegedly to blame for the network's decision to end the series..."

http://www.film.com/tv/story/theyhav...982602/1500997

spiderr987 · 12-11-2007, 03:17 PM

As of yesterday, Dec 10th, the force majeure clause kicked in for GINO [Galactica In Name Only] stating in the contracts if production on a show is shut down for more than 5 weeks, the production company can cancel the show. Taking into account, that GINO has bleed 66% drop in ratings, it's safe to say that GINO is done, midway through this season.

hroseman · 12-19-2007, 12:55 AM

You know, there is something that really gets me... Its like a fan of an original song that has been done by a new artist.

If you don't like it, don't listen to it, in this case don't watch it!

In your case however... You obviously watch the show, It IS NOT THE ORIGINAL!

It never pretended to be!!!

So take your attitude and put it where it won't be seen, as quite a few people enjoy this program.

And just so you know, I never cared for the first one... This one is The Gallactica in Everything, Including Name!

The Hroseman

spiderr987 · 12-19-2007, 03:53 PM

NBC's "Bionic Woman" is an unspectacular remake. The Sci Fi's "Flash Gordon" is even worse than anything I've written about so far. And my feelings about the new "Battlestar" are the same: It's a spiritless, uninvolving trip through space.

Breathing new life into an old story takes smarts, a lot of heart and certainly the courage to do things that seem risky.

"Tin Man," like the characters in it, doesn't have any of those things. And the people who come up with these idiotic remakes don't either.

http://www.sltrib.com/tv/ci_7593876

spiderr987 · 12-19-2007, 04:01 PM

"Unfortunately, like so many basic cable channels, Sci Fi is a devotee of the cult of the "signature show," a highly visible hit [which is really a laughable 1.2 ratings average] that is then replicated throughout the schedule. For Sci Fi, that means applying the bleak, violent, unyieldingly unpleasant revisionist outlook of Battlestar Galactica to as many projects as possible — including its six-hour Wizard of Oz remake, Tin Man."

- Today's USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/life/televis...n_N.htm?csp=34

Sound and Fury: the Sputtering Candle of Battlestar Galactica
Reviewed by Dan Hartland
18 January 2007

I didn't want to write this review.

I mean that in several ways. Most obviously, I didn't actually want to write this review. Unfortunately, Strange Horizons found reviewers who did want to rather thin on the ground. But also, I had never wanted to write this review. I didn't want it to be necessary. So I didn't want to write it. But neither did anybody else, and I'm a sucker.

In John Webster's revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, the bullied and bullying assassin Bosola famously remarks, "We are merely the stars' tennis-yarbles, struck and banded / Which way please them" (V.iv.55-55). Bosola would have recognised what it now means to be a character on Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica. If the show has always attracted attention for the issues it deals with, the way in which it deals with them, and the positions it does—or doesn't—take on them, it was also once a show which dealt with the issues from a base of sound and consistent interpersonal dynamics. That is, its characters were people we could believe in and make sense of, individuals with personalities which informed their actions and reactions.

However surprising the twist, it tended to make sense—and its repercussions tended to be fierce. In the early episode "Bastille Day," Apollo couldn't seek to enlist the help of prisoners without accommodating the malcontent Tom Zarek, who was simultaneously sympathetic and wrong; even in "Litmus," one of the more thematically muddled of the first season's episodes, the characters and their reactions remained inviolate, from Chief Tylenol's baffled affront to Adama's careful firmness. In a show which has never been consistent in theme or even internal mythology, this character-based approach was the glue which held the show together. However shocking the revelation or roaring the explosion, the viewer could trust that no event on Battlestar Galactica existed in a vacuum. It was this, above all other things, which made the show worth watching. If season two's "The Farm" was troubling for all the wrong reasons, it nevertheless sat in the middle of an exhilarating run of episodes (probably the finest extended run the show has ever managed, and possibly still the series' high point) which filled every second with another bit of plot but never seemed to run out of space or humanity.

Those days, however, are long gone. In its third season, Moore's show has become something quite different. The signs were there at the end of the show's sophomore run—its last episode, rushed and ragged, served provisional notice that Battlestar Galactica was now a series more interested in thrills and spills than any sort of thoughtful coherence or real moral complexity. And, this season, so it proved from the off.

With the human survivors of the original Cylon attack camped on New Caprica, and a skeleton fleet not fit for the task of protecting them in retreat, season three begins with the story of a human resistance to a Cylon occupation. Thus enabled to address difficult questions about what are and are not acceptable asymmetrical tactics, Battlestar Galactica chickened out. In "Occupation," the season premiere, the show fumbled every conceivable question about the tactic of suicide bombing, from its efficacy as a tool of war to the morality of its contexts of use, by making its suicide bomber a soldier, and his targets a paramilitary arm of the occupying forces. It was as if the show wanted to pay lip service to the idea of being edgy and courageous without laying any of the tedious, difficult groundwork—Battlestar Galactica wanted to enjoy the effect of the outwardly contentious without in truth something which approached even mildly controversial.

In "A Measure of Salvation," the crew engaged in a debate about the ethics of infecting the Cylon race with a deadly plague (we'll ignore for a moment Lee Adama's sudden and convenient transformation into a toaster-hating uber-pragmatist), but ultimately the decision is taken out of their hands and the only character to act—Helo, who ensures that Galactica's biological Trojan horse is rendered useless—gets away with his mutinous behaviour scot-free. There were fair questions to be asked by this episode: could the humans be justified in using a terrible weapon to ensure their (increasingly doubtful) survival, and have the Cylons entirely given up the right to enjoy the viewer's sympathy? Instead, "A Measure of Salvation" simultaneously simplified the issues through the use of Lee's newfound vengeful bent and then dodged the black and white question they did ask. Michael Angeli, the segment's writer, in this way followed what is by now a tried and tested Battlestar Galactica policy—strike the pose, dodge the bullet.

But the moment at which this reviewer realized that Battlestar Galactica wasn't itself anymore came a little earlier in "Exodus, Part II." Saul Tigh discovers that his wife, Ellen, has been passing information about the resistance to the Cylon occupiers in an attempt to save her husband's life. Tigh confronts her, secures her confession, and promptly poisons her. Michael Hogan—enjoying a superlative period of unimpeachable performances—does his redoubtable best with this histrionic material. By this point, Tigh had already spent weeks in a Cylon prison, suffered through torture and lost an eye, ruthlessly administered a resistance and organised suicide bombings, and descended further into his persona of the misanthropic alcoholic. This is still not enough for the writers of Battlestar Galactica. They also require he be betrayed by the woman he loves, and that he execute her for this trespass. As Hogan sobs manfully onscreen, the viewer might be forgiven for asking how this man, who wouldn't even give up whiskey for the greater good, can suddenly be able to sacrifice his wife; but, in truth, the viewer may be too stunned by the sledgehammer being repeatedly brought down upon her head to notice.

Of course, this moment results in many weeks of Tigh sulking around Galactica feeling sorry for himself. Then he gets a nicer eyepatch and everything's OK. It's perhaps too easy to be flippant about this level of emotional manipulation, but Battlestar Galactica deserves to be roundly mocked for the portentous simplicity of its recent episodes. "Collaborators," written by Mark Verheiden and the first full episode which takes place after New Caprica has been evacuated, sees Tigh and a half-dozen others take it upon themselves to charge, try, and execute humans who have helped the Cylons. It was the single bright point in an otherwise deadening procession of "issues" episodes more interested in shocking the viewer than making them think. A fairly compelling examination of the instinct for vengeance, if "Collaborators" nevertheless succeeded in keeping the hands of most of the series regulars tolerably clean, it asked the right kinds of questions in the right kinds of ways—without flinching and without hedging.

By this point, though, the viewer had already begun to lose interest. Moore these days seems almost exclusively interested in the endpoint rather than the journey. So "Unfinished Business" needs to be a story about Apollo and Starbuck's relationship, and thus crafts an entirely unconvincing sequence of flashbacks to justify the resuscitation of their on-again off-again love affair. We are expected to accept this ret-con of the characters without question, even as we beg to know why not a hint of this sudden backstory has been dropped before. Similarly, in "Hero," Adama reveals that just prior to the Cylon attack on the colonies he had led an illegal incursion into Cylon space, thus arguably provoking the machines' devastating onslaught. The viewer resents such massive elements of backstory being conjured from nowhere. This is not merely another permutation of the show's hopeless attempt to equate the humans with the Cylons—there is simply nothing humanity could have done to fairly invite the holocaust delivered upon them by their robotic creations. It also exhibits a simple lack of respect for anything but the moment. If Battlestar Galactica wants to tell a story about Adama feeling guilty for causing Armageddon, it will tell it however it can. There is no pleasure in watching a series happy to rewrite its own mythology for the quick shock (predictably, in subsequent episodes, Adama's revelation has not been mentioned again).

The Cylons themselves, with more screentime than ever before, continue to act like a band of over-equipped quixotic teenagers. Their new Plan, for those of us still bothering to keep score, is to find Earth. This results in a sort of intergalactic Wacky Races, in which the human and Cylon fleets are never far behind each other but neither ever quite in the lead. Lucy Lawless as Number Three, arguably overtaking Tricia Helfer as the show's principal Cylon, gets to enjoy religious visions and taunting James Callis as Gaius Baltar, but has become a sort of repository for all that is inconsistent and frustrating about the robotic race: their quasi-religious bluster, their simultaneous lack of deep philosophy, their incoherent strategies, their limping characterisation. If one week Three is torturing Baltar, and the next she is sleeping with him, we can explain it to some extent by way of Baltar's colossally entertaining psychoses—but it has much more to do with writing that seems incapable of joining its own dots.

This is a problem familiar to veterans of the second half of season two, in which episodes frequently over-ran and frantic editors cut scenes like so much summer grass, only to reinsert them into the "previously on" sequences of later installments. It still seems astounding that TV writers can fail almost every week to write their episodes within the constraints of their medium, but season three has seen the same phenomenon recur to familiarly detrimental effect. In particular, the disastrous "The Passage" failed to sell either of its two storylines—one about the past of Viper pilot Louanne Katraine, the other focused on Galactica's efforts to replenish the fleet's food supply—because neither was given enough room to breathe. The drama of the episode subsequently fell flat, simply because the whys and wherefore of what precisely was happening—how did the fleet's food so suddenly deplete, why has the shadowy figure from Kat's past never sought her out before—are left unaddressed. Other vital plotpoints—the purpose and strategy of the fleet's jumps into and out of a star cluster with high radiation levels, for instance—are explained, but in so rushed a fashion that the viewer is left playing permanent catch-up.

All of this is doubly frustrating because it is not as if Battlestar Galactica does not still have its rather good points: the show's cast is full of talented actors capable of adding depth and believability to the material they're given, and the direction and high production values of the final product are often cinematic, and never short of effective. Galactica has punch, but has lost its follow-through. Its impact has been reduced. When writers fall back on characters remarking just how unlikely is a particular plot, as Felix Gaeta does in "The Eye of Jupiter," the December cliffhanger episode presumably meant to leave us all wanting more, there is something lazily wrong at the heart of the show.

Moore now demands our attention by way of hollow spectacle—a suicide bomber here, a biological plague there, a false sprinkling of false culpability for seasoning—and delivers his message with all the subtlety of a line drawing. Lee's depression is signified by a fabulous fat suit, while his affair with Starbuck ratchets up so rapidly that his confrontation with her husband has all the posturing of teenage angst without any of the emotional complexity. If the show is still capable of startling imagery and intriguing ideas (the Hybrids which control the Cylon base ships; the moment where Zarek and Roslin, about to be murdered by a Cylon death squad, comment wryly about the consequences of doing the objectively "right" thing), ultimately its now total sacrifice of character and world to issue and explosion still robs most of them of the ability to make a lasting, meaningful impression. Battlestar Galactica hasn't merely made its characters into tennis yarbles. It's just plain lost its serve.

Copyright © 2007 Dan Hartland

http://www.strangehorizons.com/revie...nd_fury_.shtml

STARGATE ATLANTIS consistantly squashing GINO in ratings race in the UK

Sky 1 Individuals 4+ Viewing (Including Timeshift) - w/e 14/01/2007

Programme 000's

1 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1832) 675
2 THE SIMPSONS (Wed 1900) 649
3 THE SIMPSONS (Wed 1932) 596
4 THE SIMPSONS (Tue 1900) 561
5 THE SIMPSONS (Mon 1900) 538
6 THE SIMPSONS (Fri 1932) 537
7 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1934) 521
8 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1802) 514
9 STARGATE ATLANTIS (Wed 2001) 493
10 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1902) 490

Sky 1 Individuals 4+ Viewing (Including Timeshift) - w/e 04/02/2007

Programme 000's

1 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1831) 1242
2 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1900) 823
3 24 (Sun 2101) 674
4 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1800) 647
5 24 (Sun 2200) 644
6 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1931) 618
7 THE SIMPSONS (Fri 1900) 607
8 THE SIMPSONS (Fri 1932) 582
9 THE SIMPSONS (Mon 1900) 566
10 STARGATE SG-1 (Tue 2000) 558

Sky 1 Individuals 4+ Viewing (Including Timeshift) - w/e 25/02/2007

Programme 000's

1 LOST (Sun 2200) 1163
2 BONES (Thu 2101) 689
3 24 (Sun 2101) 652
4 THE SIMPSONS (Mon 1900) 583
5 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1830) 580
6 STARGATE SG-1 (Tue 2001) 518
7 THE DRESDEN FILES (Wed 2101) 494
8 THE SIMPSONS (Mon 1932) 492
9 STARGATE ATLANTIS (Wed 2002) 453
10 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1900) 442

Sky 1 Individuals 4+ Viewing (Including Timeshift) - w/e 04/03/2007

Programme 000's

1 LOST (Sun 2200) 1127
2 BONES (Thu 2100) 746
3 THE DRESDEN FILES (Wed 2101) 597
4 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1830) 553
5 THE SIMPSONS (Tue 1932) 547
6 STARGATE SG-1 (Tue 2001) 531
7 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1900) 523
8 STARGATE ATLANTIS (Wed 2001) 508
9 THE SIMPSONS (Fri 1933) 505
10 24 (Sun 2101) 498

I don't get it. Where is GINO on this top 10 ratings list? I see STARGATE ATLANTIS. Hmmmmm...

One look at this thread, and it's no wonder why this show barely limped in season 4. Btw, these aren't full seasons by television standards.

netsolo · 04-02-2008, 12:26 PM

I felt compelled to register just to post an image of Don Quixote in his epic battle versus a windmill but apparently am not allowed... God Speed on your mission, QuixoteSpider...

05-14-2007, 12:29 PM	#13
Pitchy Senior Member Join Date: May 2006 Location: 127.0.0.1 Posts: 1,118	I loved ToS as a kid... but I can honestly say that the new BSG is one of the best shows I have ever seen. It rivals Lost and Stargate SG-1 for shows that I am hopelessly addicted to. Seriously though, it's almost as if this Spider guy gets paid to post bad PR or something. DUDE! get a life! It's just a TV show and I know it sucks that the new one is vastly superior to the one you love, but you are going to have to get over it. __________________ "See you guys at dinner..."

05-15-2007, 07:30 AM	#14
Gartism Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: New Hampshire Posts: 1,593	Pitchy's come to the Dark Side! Yeah - we all love to bicker on this issue, but, honestly, Sci-Fi fans are THE TOUGHEST and MOST DEVOUT of all the fan bases. Simon Pegg made some amazing jokes about Phantom Menace in Spaced because it was true. We all got it because we were all let down. ToS was great, in its day, but the drama and depth of the new series is remarkable. If only they could have bridged the gap better (a la ST:TNG) this would be a non-issue. Either way, the new producers felt a re-boot was in order and went for it. Who knows -- maybe we'll catch the old crew in a mirror world. __________________ -G Red...Neck...Man I dare you: http://www.myspace.com/ryangartley

12-19-2007, 12:55 AM	#17
hroseman Junior Member Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 1	Man, You really are something! You know, there is something that really gets me... Its like a fan of an original song that has been done by a new artist. If you don't like it, don't listen to it, in this case don't watch it! In your case however... You obviously watch the show, It IS NOT THE ORIGINAL! It never pretended to be!!! So take your attitude and put it where it won't be seen, as quite a few people enjoy this program. And just so you know, I never cared for the first one... This one is *The Gallactica in Everything, Including Name*! The Hroseman

12-19-2007, 04:01 PM	#19
spiderr987 Senior Member Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 125	"Unfortunately, like so many basic cable channels, Sci Fi is a devotee of the cult of the "signature show," a highly visible hit [which is really a laughable 1.2 ratings average] that is then replicated throughout the schedule. For Sci Fi, that means applying the bleak, violent, unyieldingly unpleasant revisionist outlook of Battlestar Galactica to as many projects as possible — including its six-hour Wizard of Oz remake, Tin Man." - Today's USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/life/televis...n_N.htm?csp=34 Sound and Fury: the Sputtering Candle of Battlestar Galactica Reviewed by Dan Hartland 18 January 2007 I didn't want to write this review. I mean that in several ways. Most obviously, I didn't actually want to write this review. Unfortunately, Strange Horizons found reviewers who did want to rather thin on the ground. But also, I had never wanted to write this review. I didn't want it to be necessary. So I didn't want to write it. But neither did anybody else, and I'm a sucker. In John Webster's revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, the bullied and bullying assassin Bosola famously remarks, "We are merely the stars' tennis-yarbles, struck and banded / Which way please them" (V.iv.55-55). Bosola would have recognised what it now means to be a character on Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica. If the show has always attracted attention for the issues it deals with, the way in which it deals with them, and the positions it does—or doesn't—take on them, it was also once a show which dealt with the issues from a base of sound and consistent interpersonal dynamics. That is, its characters were people we could believe in and make sense of, individuals with personalities which informed their actions and reactions. However surprising the twist, it tended to make sense—and its repercussions tended to be fierce. In the early episode "Bastille Day," Apollo couldn't seek to enlist the help of prisoners without accommodating the malcontent Tom Zarek, who was simultaneously sympathetic and wrong; even in "Litmus," one of the more thematically muddled of the first season's episodes, the characters and their reactions remained inviolate, from Chief Tylenol's baffled affront to Adama's careful firmness. In a show which has never been consistent in theme or even internal mythology, this character-based approach was the glue which held the show together. However shocking the revelation or roaring the explosion, the viewer could trust that no event on Battlestar Galactica existed in a vacuum. It was this, above all other things, which made the show worth watching. If season two's "The Farm" was troubling for all the wrong reasons, it nevertheless sat in the middle of an exhilarating run of episodes (probably the finest extended run the show has ever managed, and possibly still the series' high point) which filled every second with another bit of plot but never seemed to run out of space or humanity. Those days, however, are long gone. In its third season, Moore's show has become something quite different. The signs were there at the end of the show's sophomore run—its last episode, rushed and ragged, served provisional notice that Battlestar Galactica was now a series more interested in thrills and spills than any sort of thoughtful coherence or real moral complexity. And, this season, so it proved from the off. With the human survivors of the original Cylon attack camped on New Caprica, and a skeleton fleet not fit for the task of protecting them in retreat, season three begins with the story of a human resistance to a Cylon occupation. Thus enabled to address difficult questions about what are and are not acceptable asymmetrical tactics, Battlestar Galactica chickened out. In "Occupation," the season premiere, the show fumbled every conceivable question about the tactic of suicide bombing, from its efficacy as a tool of war to the morality of its contexts of use, by making its suicide bomber a soldier, and his targets a paramilitary arm of the occupying forces. It was as if the show wanted to pay lip service to the idea of being edgy and courageous without laying any of the tedious, difficult groundwork—Battlestar Galactica wanted to enjoy the effect of the outwardly contentious without in truth something which approached even mildly controversial. In "A Measure of Salvation," the crew engaged in a debate about the ethics of infecting the Cylon race with a deadly plague (we'll ignore for a moment Lee Adama's sudden and convenient transformation into a toaster-hating uber-pragmatist), but ultimately the decision is taken out of their hands and the only character to act—Helo, who ensures that Galactica's biological Trojan horse is rendered useless—gets away with his mutinous behaviour scot-free. There were fair questions to be asked by this episode: could the humans be justified in using a terrible weapon to ensure their (increasingly doubtful) survival, and have the Cylons entirely given up the right to enjoy the viewer's sympathy? Instead, "A Measure of Salvation" simultaneously simplified the issues through the use of Lee's newfound vengeful bent and then dodged the black and white question they did ask. Michael Angeli, the segment's writer, in this way followed what is by now a tried and tested Battlestar Galactica policy—strike the pose, dodge the bullet. But the moment at which this reviewer realized that Battlestar Galactica wasn't itself anymore came a little earlier in "Exodus, Part II." Saul Tigh discovers that his wife, Ellen, has been passing information about the resistance to the Cylon occupiers in an attempt to save her husband's life. Tigh confronts her, secures her confession, and promptly poisons her. Michael Hogan—enjoying a superlative period of unimpeachable performances—does his redoubtable best with this histrionic material. By this point, Tigh had already spent weeks in a Cylon prison, suffered through torture and lost an eye, ruthlessly administered a resistance and organised suicide bombings, and descended further into his persona of the misanthropic alcoholic. This is still not enough for the writers of Battlestar Galactica. They also require he be betrayed by the woman he loves, and that he execute her for this trespass. As Hogan sobs manfully onscreen, the viewer might be forgiven for asking how this man, who wouldn't even give up whiskey for the greater good, can suddenly be able to sacrifice his wife; but, in truth, the viewer may be too stunned by the sledgehammer being repeatedly brought down upon her head to notice. Of course, this moment results in many weeks of Tigh sulking around Galactica feeling sorry for himself. Then he gets a nicer eyepatch and everything's OK. It's perhaps too easy to be flippant about this level of emotional manipulation, but Battlestar Galactica deserves to be roundly mocked for the portentous simplicity of its recent episodes. "Collaborators," written by Mark Verheiden and the first full episode which takes place after New Caprica has been evacuated, sees Tigh and a half-dozen others take it upon themselves to charge, try, and execute humans who have helped the Cylons. It was the single bright point in an otherwise deadening procession of "issues" episodes more interested in shocking the viewer than making them think. A fairly compelling examination of the instinct for vengeance, if "Collaborators" nevertheless succeeded in keeping the hands of most of the series regulars tolerably clean, it asked the right kinds of questions in the right kinds of ways—without flinching and without hedging. By this point, though, the viewer had already begun to lose interest. Moore these days seems almost exclusively interested in the endpoint rather than the journey. So "Unfinished Business" needs to be a story about Apollo and Starbuck's relationship, and thus crafts an entirely unconvincing sequence of flashbacks to justify the resuscitation of their on-again off-again love affair. We are expected to accept this ret-con of the characters without question, even as we beg to know why not a hint of this sudden backstory has been dropped before. Similarly, in "Hero," Adama reveals that just prior to the Cylon attack on the colonies he had led an illegal incursion into Cylon space, thus arguably provoking the machines' devastating onslaught. The viewer resents such massive elements of backstory being conjured from nowhere. This is not merely another permutation of the show's hopeless attempt to equate the humans with the Cylons—there is simply nothing humanity could have done to fairly invite the holocaust delivered upon them by their robotic creations. It also exhibits a simple lack of respect for anything but the moment. If Battlestar Galactica wants to tell a story about Adama feeling guilty for causing Armageddon, it will tell it however it can. There is no pleasure in watching a series happy to rewrite its own mythology for the quick shock (predictably, in subsequent episodes, Adama's revelation has not been mentioned again). The Cylons themselves, with more screentime than ever before, continue to act like a band of over-equipped quixotic teenagers. Their new Plan, for those of us still bothering to keep score, is to find Earth. This results in a sort of intergalactic Wacky Races, in which the human and Cylon fleets are never far behind each other but neither ever quite in the lead. Lucy Lawless as Number Three, arguably overtaking Tricia Helfer as the show's principal Cylon, gets to enjoy religious visions and taunting James Callis as Gaius Baltar, but has become a sort of repository for all that is inconsistent and frustrating about the robotic race: their quasi-religious bluster, their simultaneous lack of deep philosophy, their incoherent strategies, their limping characterisation. If one week Three is torturing Baltar, and the next she is sleeping with him, we can explain it to some extent by way of Baltar's colossally entertaining psychoses—but it has much more to do with writing that seems incapable of joining its own dots. This is a problem familiar to veterans of the second half of season two, in which episodes frequently over-ran and frantic editors cut scenes like so much summer grass, only to reinsert them into the "previously on" sequences of later installments. It still seems astounding that TV writers can fail almost every week to write their episodes within the constraints of their medium, but season three has seen the same phenomenon recur to familiarly detrimental effect. In particular, the disastrous "The Passage" failed to sell either of its two storylines—one about the past of Viper pilot Louanne Katraine, the other focused on Galactica's efforts to replenish the fleet's food supply—because neither was given enough room to breathe. The drama of the episode subsequently fell flat, simply because the whys and wherefore of what precisely was happening—how did the fleet's food so suddenly deplete, why has the shadowy figure from Kat's past never sought her out before—are left unaddressed. Other vital plotpoints—the purpose and strategy of the fleet's jumps into and out of a star cluster with high radiation levels, for instance—are explained, but in so rushed a fashion that the viewer is left playing permanent catch-up. All of this is doubly frustrating because it is not as if Battlestar Galactica does not still have its rather good points: the show's cast is full of talented actors capable of adding depth and believability to the material they're given, and the direction and high production values of the final product are often cinematic, and never short of effective. Galactica has punch, but has lost its follow-through. Its impact has been reduced. When writers fall back on characters remarking just how unlikely is a particular plot, as Felix Gaeta does in "The Eye of Jupiter," the December cliffhanger episode presumably meant to leave us all wanting more, there is something lazily wrong at the heart of the show. Moore now demands our attention by way of hollow spectacle—a suicide bomber here, a biological plague there, a false sprinkling of false culpability for seasoning—and delivers his message with all the subtlety of a line drawing. Lee's depression is signified by a fabulous fat suit, while his affair with Starbuck ratchets up so rapidly that his confrontation with her husband has all the posturing of teenage angst without any of the emotional complexity. If the show is still capable of startling imagery and intriguing ideas (the Hybrids which control the Cylon base ships; the moment where Zarek and Roslin, about to be murdered by a Cylon death squad, comment wryly about the consequences of doing the objectively "right" thing), ultimately its now total sacrifice of character and world to issue and explosion still robs most of them of the ability to make a lasting, meaningful impression. Battlestar Galactica hasn't merely made its characters into tennis yarbles. It's just plain lost its serve. Copyright © 2007 Dan Hartland http://www.strangehorizons.com/revie...nd_fury_.shtml STARGATE ATLANTIS consistantly squashing GINO in ratings race in the UK Sky 1 Individuals 4+ Viewing (Including Timeshift) - w/e 14/01/2007 Programme 000's 1 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1832) 675 2 THE SIMPSONS (Wed 1900) 649 3 THE SIMPSONS (Wed 1932) 596 4 THE SIMPSONS (Tue 1900) 561 5 THE SIMPSONS (Mon 1900) 538 6 THE SIMPSONS (Fri 1932) 537 7 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1934) 521 8 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1802) 514 9 STARGATE ATLANTIS (Wed 2001) 493 10 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1902) 490 Sky 1 Individuals 4+ Viewing (Including Timeshift) - w/e 04/02/2007 Programme 000's 1 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1831) 1242 2 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1900) 823 3 24 (Sun 2101) 674 4 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1800) 647 5 24 (Sun 2200) 644 6 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1931) 618 7 THE SIMPSONS (Fri 1900) 607 8 THE SIMPSONS (Fri 1932) 582 9 THE SIMPSONS (Mon 1900) 566 10 STARGATE SG-1 (Tue 2000) 558 Sky 1 Individuals 4+ Viewing (Including Timeshift) - w/e 25/02/2007 Programme 000's 1 LOST (Sun 2200) 1163 2 BONES (Thu 2101) 689 3 24 (Sun 2101) 652 4 THE SIMPSONS (Mon 1900) 583 5 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1830) 580 6 STARGATE SG-1 (Tue 2001) 518 7 THE DRESDEN FILES (Wed 2101) 494 8 THE SIMPSONS (Mon 1932) 492 9 STARGATE ATLANTIS (Wed 2002) 453 10 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1900) 442 Sky 1 Individuals 4+ Viewing (Including Timeshift) - w/e 04/03/2007 Programme 000's 1 LOST (Sun 2200) 1127 2 BONES (Thu 2100) 746 3 THE DRESDEN FILES (Wed 2101) 597 4 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1830) 553 5 THE SIMPSONS (Tue 1932) 547 6 STARGATE SG-1 (Tue 2001) 531 7 THE SIMPSONS (Sun 1900) 523 8 STARGATE ATLANTIS (Wed 2001) 508 9 THE SIMPSONS (Fri 1933) 505 10 24 (Sun 2101) 498 I don't get it. Where is GINO on this top 10 ratings list? I see STARGATE ATLANTIS. Hmmmmm... One look at this thread, and it's no wonder why this show barely limped in season 4. Btw, these aren't full seasons by television standards. Last edited by smileyone : 09-04-2009 at 06:37 PM. Reason: Multi Posting etc...

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04-29-2007, 11:33 AM	#11
elmir89 Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 1	BSG is a great show. the reason why it has changed so much is because the audience has grown up since TOS. also it has just been announced that s4 will have 22 episodes so i guess ratings weren't such a big deal. also with all the other problems that there are in the world i can't believe that you are wasting all your anger and sense of injustice on a TV show. love the show but can see it as that. a show. ps RDM rocks!

05-07-2007, 01:27 AM	#12
wingsabre Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2007 Posts: 3	yeah, it is just a show... I do have a feeling that the 4th season will be the last, and if not, the 5th for sure will be. RDM has said that the series is not intended to go on forever and has a definite end, and that's when they find earth. There's not going to be a BSG 1980's re-imagined series, where they land on earth and find out that it's not really an advanced earth. then when the series ends, those GENO whiners can go whine about something else, or they may become Dr. GENO, or: How they Learned to Stop Whining and Love the show.

06-26-2007, 02:12 PM	#15
spiderr987 Senior Member Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 125	"Edward James Olmos says he feels "terrible" about the cancellation." "As for the fact that ratings are allegedly to blame for the network's decision to end the series..." http://www.film.com/tv/story/theyhav...982602/1500997

12-11-2007, 03:17 PM	#16
spiderr987 Senior Member Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 125	As of yesterday, Dec 10th, the force majeure clause kicked in for GINO [Galactica In Name Only] stating in the contracts if production on a show is shut down for more than 5 weeks, the production company can cancel the show. Taking into account, that GINO has bleed 66% drop in ratings, it's safe to say that GINO is done, midway through this season.

12-19-2007, 03:53 PM	#18
spiderr987 Senior Member Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 125	NBC's "Bionic Woman" is an unspectacular remake. The Sci Fi's "Flash Gordon" is even worse than anything I've written about so far. And my feelings about the new "Battlestar" are the same: It's a spiritless, uninvolving trip through space. Breathing new life into an old story takes smarts, a lot of heart and certainly the courage to do things that seem risky. "Tin Man," like the characters in it, doesn't have any of those things. And the people who come up with these idiotic remakes don't either. http://www.sltrib.com/tv/ci_7593876

04-02-2008, 12:26 PM	#20
netsolo Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2008 Posts: 6	I felt compelled to register just to post an image of Don Quixote in his epic battle versus a windmill but apparently am not allowed... God Speed on your mission, QuixoteSpider...