Annalee, what killed Caprica was something far simpler than this. Characters, or lack thereof. There was nobody on the show who made you want to tune in to see what happens to them, except perhaps the minor characters of Tamara and Billy, and him only because he's the hero of BSG.
All the major characters were people you didn't just dislike, you didn't care about them. It's OK for characters to be mixed or flawed or even evil. I do want to know the fate of Darth Vader or other love-to-hate villains. But you must care.
Most of the audience would have been highly pleased if Amanda had died in her bridge fall. Daniel makes little sense and went from neutral to bad. Others are members of a terrorist group with which we have little reason to sympathise, and Zoe-A, though we might empathise with her, is the foremother of the creatures who will wipe out humanity. The rest are nasty mobsters who are showing mostly negative character growth, not positive.
What's left is the interesting story of Tamara and New Cap City, but there was too little of it. And too little of the stuff you were hoping for, the uploading , the virtual worlds etc. The established alternate sexuality was interesting but just background (as, in a way, it should be) and seemed, like the Tauron Mob, to be made up as they were going along.
With nobody to care about, there was no reason to tune in. And people didn't.
All the major characters were people you didn't just dislike, you didn't care about them. It's OK for characters to be mixed or flawed or even evil. I do want to know the fate of Darth Vader or other love-to-hate villains. But you must care.
Most of the audience would have been highly pleased if Amanda had died in her bridge fall. Daniel makes little sense and went from neutral to bad. Others are members of a terrorist group with which we have little reason to sympathise, and Zoe-A, though we might empathise with her, is the foremother of the creatures who will wipe out humanity. The rest are nasty mobsters who are showing mostly negative character growth, not positive.
What's left is the interesting story of Tamara and New Cap City, but there was too little of it. And too little of the stuff you were hoping for, the uploading , the virtual worlds etc. The established alternate sexuality was interesting but just background (as, in a way, it should be) and seemed, like the Tauron Mob, to be made up as they were going along.
With nobody to care about, there was no reason to tune in. And people didn't.
Come on Annalee. Caprica did have some good elements to it but it lacked something pretty important: Characters the audience could care about. None of the major characters held my attention or my sympathy. Tamara was interesting but minor, and so I found myself itching to FF over anything with Amanada to get to New Cap City.
But there's nobody you would like if you knew them. I mean you can kinda like Zoe if you forget she's the cause of the destruction of humanity, or at least Gog's instrument in it.
But there's nobody you would like if you knew them. I mean you can kinda like Zoe if you forget she's the cause of the destruction of humanity, or at least Gog's instrument in it.
Sadly, it never works to do this. No matter how much they love you, not matter how much they trust you, they always want to see why you told them not to watch the ending.
It seems we can never imagine that it could be harmful to watch more. I mean we watch up to where they tell us to stop, so we get all the goodness of that, and then we need to know why the rest should be avoided.
Take one that many people agree on. Stop "A.I." at the moment the boy falls into the sea. After they watch they come back and tell you they did not stop there and wished they had. We just can't look away.
Of all the spots, the landing on the irradiated Earth is the obvious one because they planned this as a possible ending if the strike went on too long. The great thing, oddly, about this ending is that it answers so little, so you can fill in great answers and leave the show satisfied with your answers. Since we knew there was more we mostly argued about whether this was our Earth, or another one, why it was nuked etc. Had we not known there would be more we would have written up our explanations of what it really means and been satisfied, though annoyed we had to fill in so much.
That ending -- it's the far future, and Earth is in ruins, and all is lost -- is at least consistent with the show history, the Tomb of Athena, the Final Five as being from original Earth etc.
I fear she didn't get my point, Charlie. Sure one character may be forced onto the toilet. But calmly reading? And all the people who are watching ordinary TV shows? Every TV channel in the world would be showing "live coverage of the big anticipated 137 seconds from around the world."
They wanted "Mark" to be working on the case so they wrote him one way, and everybody else the other way. I'm afraid it's still Hollywood Time Travel.
@sdrg1979001: Our own moon does *not* have one side lit consistently. Rather, one side always faces the Earth. The lunar day and orbit (month) are the same. This is called "tidal lock" and occurs with many small bodies in close orbit.
Likewise, we presume Pandora is in tidal lock around its primary, and so its orbital period and day are the same, which means it is orbiting fast and close.
The 4/6 legs thing indeed makes no sense. The Na'vi are more like humans than the animals on this planet, except for the neural braid, which they share with them. The neural braid makes no evolutionary sense, however.
The 4 legged Na'vi are that way because the audience thinks 2 legs good, 4 legs bad.
Come now, it doesn't hurt "Ghandi" that they show you his murder at the start of the movie (if you did not already know) or other shows which do this. It just requires different storytelling. It may be harder but it is often done well and produces the best stuff.
@icy_one:
Damn this comment system, lost my comment in one click. Here is your cite, a Wired article:
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-06/ff_moore_transcript?currentPage=4
Afraid I will not be retyping the rest.
Damn this comment system, lost my comment in one click. Here is your cite, a Wired article:
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-06/ff_moore_transcript?currentPage=4
Afraid I will not be retyping the rest.
@Sabbatai:
God wasn't there in the first episode. Religion was. Just because the Cylons believed in a god is hardly proof the god is real and controlling events. (Indeed, I don't think it was, in the writers' minds, back then.)
As I say, in an SF story, you have people who talk about gods and claim to be gods all the time. The normal assumption is they are lying or mistaken, not that it's the truth.
God wasn't there in the first episode. Religion was. Just because the Cylons believed in a god is hardly proof the god is real and controlling events. (Indeed, I don't think it was, in the writers' minds, back then.)
As I say, in an SF story, you have people who talk about gods and claim to be gods all the time. The normal assumption is they are lying or mistaken, not that it's the truth.
@MonstersAndRockets:
But was that what you think the ending meant? That we should consider the implications of a fictional god with a plan for us?
I'm fairly confident that's not it at all. As noted in other areas, Moore pumped up the religion when the studio asked him to, since they were (quite correctly I think) interested in the idea of religious robots.
Religion in robots is not the same as there being a real god of the robots, though.
I think the god became just a means to have something behind the scenes pulling the strings that needed pulling, and that's a the cop-out.
I was demanding realism, and got it in many episodes, because Moore promised it. I enjoy my fantasy, even my religious fantasy. But I also want to enjoy my realistic SF, just the way Moore promised it.
But was that what you think the ending meant? That we should consider the implications of a fictional god with a plan for us?
I'm fairly confident that's not it at all. As noted in other areas, Moore pumped up the religion when the studio asked him to, since they were (quite correctly I think) interested in the idea of religious robots.
Religion in robots is not the same as there being a real god of the robots, though.
I think the god became just a means to have something behind the scenes pulling the strings that needed pulling, and that's a the cop-out.
I was demanding realism, and got it in many episodes, because Moore promised it. I enjoy my fantasy, even my religious fantasy. But I also want to enjoy my realistic SF, just the way Moore promised it.
@neolex:
Wow, really? It's just the random google ads, but if you tell me what URL it had this one is worth blocking. (My google contract forbids me encourage people to click on it who aren't really interested.)
Wow, really? It's just the random google ads, but if you tell me what URL it had this one is worth blocking. (My google contract forbids me encourage people to click on it who aren't really interested.)
@shoroko:
MTE is such a poor choice because she is the one common ancestor that is clearly wrong. We know our MTDNA isn't alien. Moore could make arguments about the rest of our DNA, but he picked the one piece of DNA that screws it up.
MTE is such a poor choice because she is the one common ancestor that is clearly wrong. We know our MTDNA isn't alien. Moore could make arguments about the rest of our DNA, but he picked the one piece of DNA that screws it up.
@themidnighter:
While I do of course make the case that the show failed to meet my standards, I think I also make the case it failed to meet the ones Moore laid out.
Whether you find it obvious and fitting or not "the mother of all deus ex machinas" is still a poor ending to any kind of story, but particularly to an SF story.
Moore didn't plan for this at the very start. He had his Cylons talk about God, and the studio noticed this and said "give us more of this" so he made the Cylons more religious -- and eventually he made their religion true.
I don't think that's a good way to work out a story either, but that is my opinion.
However, there are more objective arguments that he did violate his own rules. He had bad science, god-like beings, as well as divine ones, and characters that were overshadowed by the divine plan and the mystery plots. And all so easily fixed.
While I do of course make the case that the show failed to meet my standards, I think I also make the case it failed to meet the ones Moore laid out.
Whether you find it obvious and fitting or not "the mother of all deus ex machinas" is still a poor ending to any kind of story, but particularly to an SF story.
Moore didn't plan for this at the very start. He had his Cylons talk about God, and the studio noticed this and said "give us more of this" so he made the Cylons more religious -- and eventually he made their religion true.
I don't think that's a good way to work out a story either, but that is my opinion.
However, there are more objective arguments that he did violate his own rules. He had bad science, god-like beings, as well as divine ones, and characters that were overshadowed by the divine plan and the mystery plots. And all so easily fixed.
Pleeze...
So many of these can be traced to the Berserkers, who were well on their way to wiping out a whole galaxy. Many think the Planet Killer from Star Trek: TOS was based on them too, and it did eat its share of planets.
Here are some captions:
Daniel: "Sometimes I forget you're no longer the little girl I used to give piggy-back rides to, Zoe."
Daniel: "I don't care that all your friends have cell phones, you're not getting one."
Daneil: "You be back home by 10:30, young woman or you are _so_ deactivated for a week."
Zoe: "I suppose that pony I wanted is out of the question, now."
Zoe: "I think we should discuss that increase in my allowance one more time."
Just to be clear, when you say "it makes sense" that we would breed, you mean that from a dramatic TV standpoint, I hope. It's complete scientific nonsense, of course. Breeding is only going to happen between genetic cousins with a fairly recent common ancestor, it could not happen between aliens. Except perhaps with some bizarre genetic manipulation technology being used and probably not even then.
So why is it so popular in TV SF? Well, first of all, TV SF always has aliens who look like humans, because it's much easier to find actors to play them. And of course they are played by hot, TV-star humans, so the question of sex comes up. But it's the purest fantasy, not really SF.
The one exception in your list is Hera. Her mother's DNA was derived from human DNA some 4,000 years ago in that show, and that makes breeding potentially possible -- there's a recent common ancestor. Hera could never have bred with the natives on our Earth, of course, as Adama himself says. Baltar's explanation of divine intervention is necessary. (One of the sucky parts of that ending. It would have been much better if Baltar had said that God must have taken people from our Earth long ago to start the population on Kobol. That would have made much more sense.)
In fact, any panspermia plot is pretty much going to be scientific nonsense, unless you put the panspermia back close to a billion years. The "Ark" theory, that humans and animals came to Earth in relatively recent (ie. last 100,000 and in fact far more years) is really, really, really debunked. Thanks to creationists it is perhaps the most debunked idea in the history of history.
I wrote an essay on these questions here, because so many people cling to the Battlestar Galactica plot of 1978.
You can find it at: [ideas.4brad.com]
Now, as to the question of Battlestar, it is not at all clear that the new series is a Panspermia story. Moore, the producer was asked this question after season 1, and he said it would not be such a story in his blog, but he was going to try to write a story to merge the ideas of the old show and the scientific non-reality of recent panspermia.
There are two possible options now, since the "Earth" they found is not our Earth (since I am pretty sure our real planet was not named by Cylon colonists.)
1) This "Earth" is given that name, to match the old show's quest, but is not at all our Earth in any meaningful way, not the same culture, no fossils in the ground, etc.
2) There is a real Earth out there, as shown at the end of season 3. One growing opinion is that we'll see it, since the stars in the scene of the Cylon civil war are exactly the Earth stars, and aside from a few related scenes, those stars are not seen anywhere else, including on "Earth" the 13th colony.
But we'll see. In the meantime check out the essay.
Don't worry, Charlie. I think the BSG crew are deliberately releasing a series of fake leaks to cover up any real leaks, and this is a fake one.
It was revealed quite early on in the show (in the Tomb of Athena scene, where they saw that the flags of the colonies were patterns from the Earth Zodiac) that this show is not going to follow the nonsense-plot of our planet being a colony of some other system, with humans evolving off-Earth. That may have been the plot of Galactica 1980 but fortunately Moore has let us know in a variety of ways it's not the plot here.
Mankind originated on Earth (duh) and this is all taking place in the future. Of that you can be sure. The 13th colony is just a legend used to cover up the truth in their mythology. Just what sort of future is something for more speculation.
I should add that the reason those two are my top 2 plots is all the clues. "Four in your fleet" -- she's not lying, because of what she does (orders to nuke the fleet if the 4 aren't given) not what she says. She really feels the final Cylon is not in the fleet, so it's not Gaeta or Apollo. Could be Roslin, Ellen or Cally. But Roslin's in the "Last Supper" photo which Ron Moore confirms does not have the final Cylon. (Is it virtual Six or Caprica Six in Baltar's appartment in the photo? They look identical.)
That leaves only the dead, the virtual and the robotic.
The important line is your title -- "good enough." Most people's proposals are simply too hard to make into a great ending, an ending that matches what the producers keep hyping as grand and satisfying.
I've thought of a couple (non-popular) choices that could make a great ending.
#1: The Final Cylon is the "Virtual Being." You know, the most popular character on the show for many viewers, usually played by Tricia Helfer, sometimes by James Callis, once by Rennie (Leoben.). The character nobody thinks is the final Cylon because it's hiding in plain sight.
Why does D'Anna not believe this character is in the fleet? Because she saw it as Baltar, her lover. It isn't Baltar, but she thinks it is.
This character is closely tied to the Cylon god. This character is probably the main programmer on Earth who created the original AIs that became the Cylons. Other than as Shelley Godfrey, this character has not yet taken a physical form. I would guess it might take the form of Six as this is the form most viewers know for it.
2: Ellen Tigh. Ellen and Saul have been lovers for over 4,000 years, since they first fell in love, as humans, back on Earth at a Hendrix concert. They and 3 others uploaded their minds into computerized form, and for 4,000 years they have had an on-again, off-again marriage, sometimes ending with Saul killing Ellen, sometimes with Ellen killing Saul, sometimes other ways. Their love story is painted against the history of the artificial human/cylon race, and after many repetitions, this is the final chapter.
Are these stories good enough?
More details on them at my battlestar blog, [ideas.4brad.com]
It is a huge plot flaw, but one theory, growing in popularity, explains it well.
It is laid out in the credits of the first episodes. They look, act and feel human. Some of them are programmed to think they are human.
Including all the colonials, the people you think are human.
They are all cylons, all artificial, came from Earth long ago. They can't tell the difference because they are programmed not to, and there isn't really one anyway.
