Battlestar Craptastica, It is to Meh

[akirlu]

Home sick again today. Had been sliding downhill over the weekend, and have been battling the chills all day. Am I not supposed to get *well* before I get sick again? Feh. Main upside is, I've been able to catch up on some commenting over in deathless_pose.

Last night, Hal and I watched about two-thirds of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. I had heard good things about the new series, so we had earlier gotten the first disc of Series 1 from Netflix, only to discover that the first disc of Series 1 does not, in fact, start at the beginning of the story. So now we're watching from the beginning. I have to say for me, keeping my disbelief in the air has been a challenge almost from the very beginning. To wit, Cylons pulling up, totally undetected and walking in unnoticed and unchallenged, to the outpost space station humanity left behind expressly for the purpose of meeting Cylons at. I understand that not much has happened in the last few decades, but does this mean that the station, even if under-manned, has no remote sensing equipment, no alarms, no guards, and no regular pattern of checking in with home base? We're supposed to believe that the only person on the entire base is one old guy who sits around in a giant empty room falling asleep over his protocols? Er, hmm.

And once the Cylons kill the guy, still undetected, and then go on to bomb an entire space station to flinders, no automatied distress call goes out, and no serious alarm goes up anywhere in the colonies when an entire base falls out of contact? Nobody even notices let alone gets majorly alarmed by the fact that, hey, our only point of contact with the at-last-check-hostile Cylons has been blown out of the sky? Er.

And then, when finally someone thinks to notice the base has gone unresponsive, the one and only battlestar commander so paranoid about Cylon intrusion methods that he won't allow computerized landings on board his ship, who refuses to network any of his computers for the same reason, gets a message suggesting he might check up on the only base between humanity and the Cylons, he decides to just blow it off? Perhaps not so much.

Meanwhile, back in the colonies, basic high-security procedures are so mindbogglingly lax, and military and defense computer systems so monolithic, unified and free of firewalls, need-to-know protocols, isolated systems, or any kind of data-quarantines at all, that a single scientist who's been turned by his mole-lover can somehow get her access to absolutely every system and subsystem of the entire defense computer complex, including passwords, protocols, and data, of twelve planets without anyone noticing or, well, raising an eyebrow???? No.

So when we get around to everyone traipsing around Caprica within close *visual* *range* of *multiple* mushroom clouds, and Baltar walks away unscathed from a blast so close that it shattered all the windows of his house, well, the rational mind has pretty much given up the ghost and gone off to gibber in a corner.

So, on the whole, meh. The show is *less* stupid than the original, and can be quite dramatically compelling at times, but I wouldn't say it's even remotely free of stupid bits.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, there's a throwaway comment before the Galactica decommissioning ceremony about Fleet asking them to check out Armistice Station, because they haven't called in -- "probably a communications malfunction".

Yeah, I couldn't remember the exact wording, but I caught that yeah. But the throwaway is made to Commander Adama, he of the anti-networking protocols so strict even his own son is surprised. Either Adama is a bugfuck paranoiac by contemporary fleet standards, or he isn't. If he's going to be painted as the lone worry-wart among the great unwashed of mindless sheep, then he has to act like it, and acting like it includes not taking it as given that it's just a malfunction without checking on that.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I'm going to ROT-13 spoilers in case you'd rather wait until you find some things out in later episodes.

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[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, *dear*. That's either startlingly bad writing, or someone's gonna have a lot of 'splaining to do as to when the switch occurred.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

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[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Okay, so the answer is "startlingly bad writing". Given the history of the Cylons as I understand it, that's just not possible.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Why not?

[avram]

Because William Adama fought in the first Cylon War, before skin-job Cylons were invented. And he married and had two sons, so if he were a skin-job, the Cylons would have had to fake not only his military records and his own memories, but his relationship with other humans.

Also, if he’s a Cylon, then Lee (and his late brother, Zak) are the first human-Cylon hybrids, which invalidates a whole other plotline.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'd forgotten he fought in the first war. You're right, that would have to be substitution.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, unless for some reason there were "secret" skin job Cylons seeded in the human population already before the first Cylon war, also invented by humans but kept a secret from virtually everybody. But you would have to tell an awfully convincing story why that would be the case.

[avram]

That's a claim made by one of the other Cylons, playing head-games with President Roslin, not something that's been established as true.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

No, there was a five-second scene that showed him acknowledging it late last season.

[avram]

I don’t remember anything along those lines.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

He was sitting on a couch, talking to a Sharon.

[avram]

Isn’t that the scene where he asks her why the Cylons hate humanity? That makes no sense if he’s a Cylon and knows it. And if he’s a Cylon and doesn’t know it, then his reactions would be the same as if he was human.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I remember him saying something about people knowing she was a Cylon, but they didn't know about him, yet. It's been a while since I saw it, though.

[avram]

My roommates are working through the second season on DVD, and I’m watching it along with them, so I’ll keep an eye out for that scene. (We’ve got a ways to go, though; we haven’t hit “Pegasus” yet.)

Was the scene in “Sacrifice”? I’ve found an online script, but don’t know how accurate it is. (Just search for “Boomer”; there are two scenes with her and Adama in that script.)

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I think that might have been it; it's hard to know without the visual.