IGNOMINIOUS END TO BSG

Yikes. Not only did Sci-Fi Channel, now SyFy (ugh) make us wait and wait and wait for BSG Season 4 then Season 4.5, now they are pushing back the telemovie The Plan to 2010, which is where they've already pushed Caprica. The Plan may even go direct-to-DVD and never air, and I've read that Caprica production has been suspended (possibly due to bad scripts). Boy, from a Peabody Award for the brilliance of the mini through Season 2.5 to this. Ron Moore really killed his Golden Goose when he checked out mentally on BSG around mid-Season 3.

BATTLESTARGATE

Well the dark and gloomy aesthetic of Ron Moore's version of Battlestar Galactica has spawned a copy. The Stargate franchise (which has gone on about 5 years too long already) is now set to air Stargate Universe [or SGU] and it features a crew trapped on a vessel trying to get home (kind of Voyager meets BSG 2003). It looks like it will be well-made but I think the SGU creators came a little too late to the dank-and-dreary party for the fans with taste. Probably this will be a hit among the mainstream because they are always years behind.

BATTLESTAR MOVIE - GLEN A LARSON VERSION

I say a hearty YES to this development. Singer has a sleek and refined visual sense and the core elements of the story remain strong. After Ron D. Moore's version went straight down to the gutter from the once lofty heights of the mini and 1st and 2nd seasons, I welcome a new interpretation by a fine director ... anything to get the bad taste out of my mouth from that terrible Season 4 and ridiculous and idiotic finale to the RDM version!

SORRY - I DESTROYED BATTLESTAR GALACTICA'S ENDING

The best of intentions can go terribly awry ... and I've wondered if the terrible ending to Battlestar Galactica is my fault. Hear me out - I'm not crazy. Ron Moore and David Eick are on record for saying that they intentionally would take the Battlestar story in a different direction other than what the fans wanted (since they monitored message boards and other feedback regularly) just to thwart them. They seemed to derive some kind of juvenile and perverse pleasure in crushing fan hopes and expectations.

Although not my normal type of night out I went to the 6.6.7 BSG "All Access Event" at the Hollywood CineramaDome because I thought there might be a Q&A and I wanted to assert whatever influence I could through my question. I had grown to love the show (but not Season 3 so much) and was deeply worried Moore and Eick would fuck up the ending. Often, really most of the time, stories these days have lousy endings - especially modern television and film. With the Greek God pantheon and Earth referenced in the Battlestar story it seemed obvious the only proper way to end it was at Earth prior to the advent of the Classical Age, i.e.; prior to 1000 B.C. - clearly the end of the story was going to be the beginning "All of this has happened before ..."

I got to the CineramaDome expecting a bunch of nerds and maybe some tech people and maybe one of the creators (Moore or Eick) and a few clips and then the panel. Little did I know Sci-Fi Channel would lay out top dollar for a full-on press rollout. Red Carpet, entertainment, cameras, the main stars, and both Moore and Eick - and a theatrical presentation of the big Jamie Bamber-monologue-trial episode which ended the 3rd season.

I got to the mic and asked my question/made my statement: Kudos to the cast present first, then I focused on Moore and Eick, "It seems to me you've painted yourselves into a corner: with the Greek God pantheon and the references to Earth, the only way you can properly end the story is in the eastern Mediterranean between 1500 and 1000 B.C." This provoked an intense stare from Eick (sitting in a director's chair onstage alongside Moore, Mary McDonnell, Lucy Lawless, Jamie Bamber, and Katie Sackhoff) for about 10 solid minutes (even after I returned to my seat). Moore jokingly said into the microphone he held in response to my remarks, "Security, please escort that man from the building," - to audience laughs, thankfully. I also urged Moore and Eick not to end the show with a lame time-travel device.

The writers' strike hit and the 4th Season was delayed forever it seemed and then Sci-Fi execs decided to milk DVD sales and postponed the second half, Season 4.5, even longer. Well, during that delay Ron Moore spent a little too much time in the sun and composed an entirely new ending to the story: god did it; Kara, Head-Six, Baltar are angels; Hera is mitochondreal Eve; the Colony; Ellen is the 5th; ad nauseum.

It has come out later - after the show ended - that Moore and Eick indeed planned an ending which had the characters give rise to the Classical Age Earth legends - and scuttled it. I went to that June '07 event with the heartfelt intent of steering the ending into the proper direction and it looks like it backfired royally. So to the fans, if I'm even partially responsible, I apologize. We certainly deserved better than the terrible terrible ending we got.

CRAPRICA - TEEN ANGST BEHIND CYLON GOD

I finally saw Ron Moore's DVD-before-TV Caprica. Glad I didn't rush to see it. Egads, I can hardly watch the original Battlestar mini without thinking of what came later (Season 4 and the finale and now Caprica) to pollute such a great show. All the mystery, all the depth and complexity to the story and the characters of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica reduced to god did it and angels walk among us ... and now, it's all a teenage girl's virtual world. Blechhh

Caprica was pretty to look at - not to the level of Baltar's house in Battlestar - and there was some of the moodiness and alien-ness of Battlestar's Caprica representation but it was told to us more than shown and shown poorly (lame tattoos and ganster patois don't count for much).

So the Cylons were created by man: a sleazy defense contractor/computer genius downloads his dead daughter's self-coded avatar into his prototype combat robot so he won't lose the contract, and this snooty, priveleged little smartypants is associated with a private school that thas faculty and students that have secret monotheistic beliefs.

Moore should rename the show All My Robots and put it on the Soap Opera Channel

TERMINATOR TERRIBLE

The trailers looked pretty good, and the advance artwork looked good, but the film itself Terminator Salvation was simply awful.

And what is it with red-eye robots (Matrix, Battlestar, and Terminator)? All these sequels are beginning to feel like the same story: Matrix morphs into Terminator into Battlestar into HAL 9000. This guy McG is a terrible terrible director, absolutely artless and obviously without an ear for dialog. The script? Full of every action movie cliche and high-school level prose. What garbage. And like the cigarettes and fuel for the jet-skis in Waterworld, where did the human Resistance in T4 get all of their military gear? How is it possible for Hollywood to fuck up these iconic franchises? A retarded squirrel could do better. Sam Worthington ... boring. New Chekov as Kyle Reese ... oh please. The little black girl who knows her way around munitions? How multicultural. The Oracle at least offered Neo a cookie, Jane Alexander only gave the little girl a carrot. And did you see the guy in the distance with the blower making smoke in the LA scene were Kyle Reese and the little girl and the Sam Worthington terminator were the only survivors - who was that guy? On the imagination scale 1-100, McG's T4 gets a 12% for originality.

REVISITING A TERRIBLE ENDING

Now that several weeks have passed since the disastrous Ron Moore-scripted ending to Battlestar Galactica, it has had time to sink in and I've realized it was even worse than I initially thought. Any fan who has taken the time since the show ended to go back and watch the mini or episodes from Seasons 1 and 2 knows just how far afield Moore took the show in Season 4 and especially 4.5 and then simply led it over a cliff in the finale. It is a quintessential example of creative hubris dooming a show. Instead of having so little sleep due to his commitments to several other projects he should have spent the time watching every episode of his Battlestar Galactica creation prior to plotting out the finale eps and writing his finale. What he came up with was nothing short of an abortion.

What made the show interesting and set it apart was Sci-Fi Channel executive Michael Jackson's suggestion that Moore play up the religious conflict and thus we had a human-made robot race that was monotheistic and a human race that was polytheistic. For once a mainstream Western science fiction show didn't have a conventional point-of-view from its characters. The names and traditions and legends of the polytheists had a direct line to our Earth of the Classical Age and a bit earlier in the Bronze Age. The whole point of the show was a people, crushed by war, were on an exodus of survival to a mythic place known as Earth.

And what happened in Moore's finale? God did it. Angels walk among us. Give up your technology (and soap and antibiotics) and live among the dirty early hominids and breed with them.

The Opera House vision - a key thematic throughline of visual interest and surreal religiosity was reduced to the ridiculous - a these-pieces-belong-on-these-squares moment. Hera? Suddenly she's Mitochondreal Eve - a minor character elevated to the fulcrum of the finale - bah! And Kara, our reborn rabble-rouser who hears the "unstruck music?" - oh, she's and angel that goes *poof*

One has to wonder, in hindsight, if Moore and the gang got lucky early on in creating such a compelling and at times profound show only to desecrate it with their terrible ending, or if they simply didn't care - position in the industry and other jobs beckoned. The characters and we the fans deserved much better.

STAR TREK REVIEW

Got a chance to see it at Paramount last night. Liked it a lot, didn't love it. Here is a link to my IMDB review:radii Star Trek review

I'M SO LAZY

Thanks for continuing to visit even though the show's over. I am so lazy. I should be finishing the Battlestar: Variant 1 fan fiction but I'm procrastinating (but wait till you read how I kill Athena) ... I recommend the following as brilliant entertainment now that there is no more Battlestar to watch: Superjail, Xavier: Renegade Angel, Moral Orel and of course Robot Chicken

GO TO SITREP

Hi kids, I've kind of lost interest in this blog now that the show's over ... Caprica looks meh to me. I am still working on the fiction for the Battlestar: Variant 1 site (linked upper right) and will give you that better ending - 0oh, the things I have planned ... but for Battlestar stuff I suggest hanging out at Galactica Sitrep

WELCOME

Now that the show is over most visitors will probably be shiny new visitors who stumbled upon the site or had it referred to them. Galactica Variants chronicled and critiqued the show from early 2007 on ... you'll find reviews, criticism, and theory here ... and some fun images. In the blogosphere I was probably considered one of the show's harshest critics. BSG gave us excellence I grew to expect, but by the midpoint of Season 3 things were going awry and Season 4 wasn't as good as earlier seasons then Season 4.5 was pretty terrible and the two-part finale simply awful. If you're new to the show, you might want to quit watching at the end of Season 3 or the mid Season 4 episode Revelations.

WANT A BETTER ENDING?

[Daybreak, Pt. II Review updated in below post]
There's little point in adding new posts to this site with the show over and all, but I might for a while. I'll add to the Death By Plot-Hole post (next one down) over time as I count the ways of lame. For now my attention is turned to finishing the 'episodes' for my version of the ending: Battlestar: Variant 1 [which you can link upper right]

I've had the story done in my head for many months but I just haven't had the time to type it out and fine-tune it yet. The first two 'eps' are done and part of the third, and the synopses are up for them all. I think you'll find it is much more satisfying than the weak Season 4.5 and the lousy god-did-it and angels-on-my-Battlestar ending we got.

I had originally intended to have all the work done over the interminable 9-month delay between Season 4 and 4.5 that SciFi imposed upon the fans, but I didn't get to it. Now more than ever we need a good version and I'll give it to you*.

Some stories are in script format, others in more of a novel format and some a mixture. This isn't anything I can sell - it is a labor of love since I did so dearly love the show through Season 2 and on-and-off after that. Enjoy.

*[for those of you who think it presumptuous of me to write a "better" version, let me save you time from posting in the comments: "You're a jerk/idiot/a-hole/smug/pretentious/arrogant/full-of-hubris/twat/clown/moron ... etc. etc." There I've done it for you. Now go enjoy it]

DEATH BY PLOT-HOLE

... updated ...
When mystery is replaced by the mundane
[this post will be a work in progress - I'm not sure I really want to compile a list of all the plot-holes and pick them apart individually (I'm sure someone will do that) - maybe I'll just do the most egregious of them]


Battlestar Galactica reimagined hooked us for a few key reasons - aspects of the show which immediately declared it was special, starting with the mini.

The Look: Cinematic, rich, and high-style. Elegant architecture and design, good-looking people, saturated color, high-quality. The Story: A sinister plot, lust, betrayal, war, exodus, survival, technology, mystery, supernatural events. Themes: Loss, flight, fight, survival, aging, rogue technology, maintaining the veneer of civilization. The Tone: Adult, practical, dark, philosophical. The Sophistication of the Subject Matter: High-level, demanding of the audience that they think. The Sexuality: Adult, realistic. The Music: Minimalist, ethereal or militaristic by turns.

It seems to me that the character partisans are quite satisfied with the finale and will never be bothered by the glaring and numerous plot-holes. That's okay - take away from it what you will.

We plot people cannot reconcile the contradictions, omissions, cop-outs, dangling story threads and be satisfied with the Kumbaya ending served to us.

What is frustrating for us is that we were teased with such promise from the beginning and there were outlines of brilliance and hints of something special.

I think I have the perfect example to explain:

We are shown and told that the skinjob Cylons can resurrect and that they can access a reservoir of data that consists of the common memories of their model line.

We see the Hybrids living in their tubs of special goo as the sentient central processing units of the Base Ships. We see the special goo (a bit slimier) in the resurrections tanks. We are told that they can exist iteration after iteration, and we know that the skinjob models have been around at least two to three decades.

So through high style production design and set-dressing, cool lighting effects and some good visual effects, as well as sound effects and music, a mood was created that added to the sense of mystery about all this. We saw them put their hands on the interface panels with the liquid and gain knowledge and communicate through them. The lighted red panels also seem to be Matrix-like data streams, as well as the projected light symbols.

We are shown and told as D'Anna repeats suicides so she can resurrect - and in that space between death and resurrection see more pieces of the puzzle of the mystery of the Final Five and that there are answers to be had. When she finally does see them in the amazing coincidence of a supernova illuminating a crystal in the Temple of Five/Temple of Hopes and sending a beam of light down onto the mandala symbol she dies from the experience as her eyes go grey but she says, high with spiritual feeling, "so beautiful, so beautiful." We as the audience we waiting to see this great beauty, this great truth. And the "truth of the Opera House" turned out to be certain people standing in the right place at the right time so a deal could be struck between Cavil and the rest of them - but the deal went south because Tyrol kills Tory for murdering a human girl he didn't really love.

This is the example: Not long after learning he is a Cylon Anders is part of the boarding party on the damaged rebel Base Ship and longs to put his hand on one of those interface panels. How we as the audience longed for him to do it. What would happen? Would the Base Ship and Hybrid instantly recognize him? Would it change the equation instantly? It was a colossal tease. A tease that was never realized.

There was always something mystical about the goo - in resurrection it played the role of the birth canal and emergence into the light (and in No Exit we finally saw the light [the red tunnel effect] from Ellen's POV as she awoke).

For those of us that like the science and design elements of our science fiction those interface panels, the colors, the lights, how it works, were nagging questions. Sam putting his hand on the damaged Base Ship panel would have answered a lot of those questions.

Instead what we got was a diminished version - the mystery made mundane.

I have noticed that at almost every turn in the show Moore has chosen to diminish that which seemed grand or mysterious. Romo was this great, intriguing character who was potentially completely amoral - or perhaps a Diogenes-like self-styled judge of men and after his appearance as Baltar's lawyer the audience was left sort of breathless, like who was that? ... then they brought him back to satisfy fan demand, I guess, and had his character behave in a way that did not comport with what we'd seen before. He was weaker, unstable, not the confident, controlled man we knew previously. And by the finale, when he was trotted in front of the audience like a popular pole-dancer and we were told he was now "president" the diminishment was complete. His character had been completely emasculated and all mystery about him gone.

The Hybridization of Anders was obvious and was not very satisfying. Did the other Cylons bring some special goo over or could any liquid do? Didn't he start spouting Hybridspeak rather suddenly after being hooked up to Galactica? There was zero transition between his "word salad" from his head injury and Hybridspeak. The Base Ships were themselves Cylon and the Hybrid a part of a living thing. The Galactica was man-made contstruct with various machine parts.

The point? When Sam's tank is brought up to the upper deck of the C&C and is networked to control Galactica and, later, when the other Final Fivers put their hands into the liquid goo to download resurrection technology to Cavil as part of their deal which Hera's Opera House journey to C&C somehow facilitated we have no more understanding of how it works. So the liquid is the information medium? Or is it merely a conduit? Only Ellen seems to remember anything of significance from their earlier lives - including resurrection technology, so touching the water unleashes those memories? Gee, if that's the case wouldn't it have been nice to see Sam touch the water in that previous ep and experience some memories? This is what I'm talking about with missed opportunities and dangling threads. Better writing would have done something like this and made more whole the meaning of the liquid and the lights and what the Cylon skinjobs experience when they interface with it and how they percieve their former lives and their relationship to the memories of other models in their line.

[more coming]

Dangling Story Threads: