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

[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.