disturbedfan121

iTrader: (5)

i bet you i can do the kessel run in 12parsecs

silentbob343

My brother teases the hell out of me for watching the show, but like Joe said it isn't all that scifi. This from a guy that doesn't like star trek or star wars.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

hey now!!!! dont dis the greatness.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Having just re-watched Revelations (this time in 720p, thanks to the magic of uTorrent), one question is really sticking out in my mind, and it provides a theory. The question is: Where did the transmission (described as a Colonial emergency locator beacon) that Starbuck's Viper received come from?

Obviously there's still the question of what happened to Starbuck, which kinda fell off the Dradis after a few episodes. If we assume that Colonial radio transmissions can travel faster than light (and there is anecdotal evidence that they do) then I have one theory which answers two questions.

Hear me out. After she mysteriously returned to the fleet during the battle of the Ionian Nebula, Stabuck described Earth to Lee as having "...Big blue oceans, fluffy white clouds." Later, at debriefing, she describes her ordeal "Took some hits, passed out. When I came to, I was orbiting this planet. Its yellow moon and star matches the description in Pythia. I took these pictures in orbit." A key point we can infer from all her descriptions is that she never landed on the planet, at least not alive.

The transmission came from Starbuck's Viper, crashed on the surface of Earth, with Starbuck's body still in it.

It explains everything. The transmission, the time discrepancy, the shiny new Viper with zero nav data.

I don't know if Starbuck made it to Earth on her own and then crashed (can a Raider jump both itself and another ship?) or if her ship really was destroyed in the storm and transported to Earth later. Either way, her ship was destroyed and she died.

Then the Cylons resurrected her.

They built her a new ship, an exact copy of the original, stuck Starbuck 2.0 into it, sent her for a spin around Earth, and then jumped her back to the fleet.

It raises more questions than it answers, but it fits.

I've spent time trying to poke holes in it, and I can't At first I thought "No, can't be, or Four wouldn't have bothered experimenting on her back on Caprica, nor would Leobin have played house with her on New Caprica." But The Seven didn't know who The Five were back then. Had no means of ID'ing them. Otherwise, why would D'anna have tried to kill Anders in the parking garage on Caprica (and then apologized to him later, after recognizing him) and the Ones have expended so much effort torturing Tigh during the occupation?

The only gotcha is: who did the resurrecting?


Yup. "Then that's it. It's been an honor.", despite being Adama's shortest speech of all time, was the most moving.

She's fast enough for you, old man.

silentbob343

Joe good call out and one I forgot to mention in my previous post; does anybody in the fleet care where starbuck went or who this starbuck is? Like you mentioned these questions stopped being asked fairly quickly.

Like you said it raises more questions;
If the transmission is from the "real" crashed viper then why don't the other colonial ships detect it? Perhaps a range issue for the other ships in the fleet, but I would assume they would detect it once they jumped over the planet.
and as you have asked:
Who/What resurrected starbuck and built the new ship?

fmowry

iTrader: (8)

So Canada doesn't get any of our good TV shows?

Check out The Wire, The Shield, or Dexter.

To be honest, I've never watched BSG (and thought it ended in '79). Just not my cup of tea. I do need some more crap to download and watch on my commute to work. Maybe I'll give it a shot.

Frank

deliverator

iTrader: (14)

BSG really is a phenomenally good show.

I was quite scornful of the dorks that used to talked about it constantly. Then I watched the miniseries and was hooked.

Told my brother that it was worth watching... Scorn. Got him the miniseries and first season for his birthday... Now he's hooked, too.

It's good stuff.

jayc72

iTrader: (14)

Dexter is good. Just not BSG good

jayc72

iTrader: (14)

Two words. Time travel.

Saml01

iTrader: (9)

Are you guys posting spoilers? Cause if you are im not gonna read this thread.

I am about to start watching the series from the very beggning.

Ben

iTrader: (33)

Not spoilers per say, but yeah you should watch the miniseries first.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Yeah, they'd be spoilers for someone who is starting at the beginning.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Lords of Kobol, I pray this isn't the case. So far, they've refrained from using tired, stereotypical sci-fi gimmicks as plot devices, and to me, that's what keeps the show plausible. So long as the number of "spectacular" technologies is kept to a minimum I can suspend disbelief. Time Travel would be jumping the shark.

Not even remotely close. You might as well be comparing Robot Chicken to the Aykroyd / Belushi era of Saturday Night Live.

Battlestar will be remembered right up there with the Sopranos in the annals of awesome television drama, all the more impressive for airing on a network that is generally known for showing old re-runs of Stargate, cheezy ghost stories, and other such feldercarb. Ron Moore, Edward Olmos, Michael Hogan, Mary McDonnell, and Tricia Helfer are going to need wheelbarrows to lug their Emmy awards out of the building this year.

Yeah, it was a big deal initially (they threw her in the brig) and it hung over her like the Sword of Damocles the whole time she was on the Demetrius, but as soon as she stumbled home with a pet Basestar in tow, they sorta dropped it.

While I don't think it's the fifth, there is something about that ship that we haven't learned yet- like why it seems to be capable of performing subliminal Bob Dylan covers. And don't forget which crewmember did the "every nut, bolt and rivet" inspection on it- one who might have subconsciously overlooked something.

And I'd have assumed that as soon as they jumped in, Lt.Cmdr. Data would have piped up and said "Captain, long range scans of the planet's surface indicate moderate levels of ambient ionizing radiation consistent with the radiological signature of nuclear weapons, and tolological surveys show what appear to be the ruins of an ancient civilization" but he didn't, at least not that we saw. Who knows what happened between the "We're home" speech and the launching of the landing party? There was a lot of fast-paced cutting in there, almost a montage. I don't know if that was for dramatic effect, or if a lot of footage wound up on the cutting room floor, for the "long journey" (which was supposed to involve multiple jumps with course refinement along the way), for the approach/landing scene and for Adama's breakdown (he went from rage and destruction to drooling like an infant too quickly, IMO, and where the frak did Lee come from?). I suspect that Revelations was probably storyboarded as a 90 minute episode originally.

Razor. Yeah, everyone seems to be forgetting those since they occured outside of the regular timeline, but it's still cannon and it has to fit into the continuity. A lot of questions are still floating around and I think that a few of them might actually be answers.

We know that there is (was) at least one group of Cylons in existance who were not actively allied with the Signifigant Seven. They were the old-model sentient Centurians on the Guardian Basestar- the one with the Old-Man Hybrid.

That Hybrid was different from the rest. Beyond the obvious physical differences, he seemed to be much more lucid than all the others. He was capable of having a normal, coherant conversation, and seemed to know a lot about Kara, and a lot about Cylon history. Specifically:

1- "Soon there will be four, glorious in awakening struggling with the knowledge of their true selves. The pain of revelation bringing new clarity and in the midst of confusion, he will find her. Enemies brought together by impossible longing. Enemies now joined as one. The way forward at once unthinkable, yet inevitable. And the fifth, still in shadow, will claw toward the light, hungering for redemption that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering." He knows about the final five, and that only four of them would be revealed initially. He knows about the alliance, which presupposes knowledge of the civil war. And who is he talking about with "he will find her"? We haven't really arrived at "terrible suffering" yet, so there's still some bad **** to go down.

2- "Kara Thrace will lead the human race to its end. She is the herald of the apocalypse, the harbinger of death. They must not follow her." Well now, how could he even know who Kara Thrace is? I can accept "minority report" style prescience on the part of the Hybrids, they're clearly operating on a different plane of reality. But does it mean that he, the Hybrid, is the one who wound up "manipulating" Starbuck and her ship? Or only that he witnessed someone else doing it.

For that matter, has she already led humanity to its end by bringing them to a dead planet? No, I expect the worst is yet to come. The fleet have at least one more good swift kick in the ***** heading their way.

3- "What am I? A man. Or am I a machine? My children believe I am God." His Children. The Signifigant Seven? And does this explain their monotheistic beliefs?

4- "As my own existence comes to a close, only to begin anew, in ways... uncertain." Begin again, eh. Resurrection, or something different? Could it be that the Old Man Hybrid is the Rebel Hybrid? It would explain her knowledge of Kara.


All of this suggests an evolutionary link between the Cylons of the first war and the Cylons of today. It is probable that this generation of Cylons were the ones to create the first Humanoid models, or at least, they built the first Hybrid and then he created the humanoids. We don't know how many more of their model (or perhaps even more of their generation of Basestars and Hybrids) still exist, but hey, ole' Imperious Leader could still be out there maintaining a government-in-exile for all we know.


Yeah. I try not to geek out about it too often (actually, this is the first time I've ever mentioned it on a forum of any kind) but it really is unexpectedly good. I'm old enough to remember the original, and how badly and painfully it sucked, so when I heard there was a new one, and on Sci-Fi of all places, I ignored it. Figured it'd be just another crappy, low-budget rehash of a tired old plot. When I finally watched the miniseries (while home with the flu, bored out of my mind) I was hooked.

jayc72

iTrader: (14)

Joe,

How do you explain the difference between the earth that Starbuck described and the one they land on? Surely the condition of the planet would have been apparent to her. What about people? Starbuck never mentions population or cities. Earth as the 13th colony has never really made sense, what about the history of earth? Being a colony earth would have been settled by people with significant technology. Where is the evidence of that?

Time travel is a valid explanation. And there is a whole lotta Cylon technology that is no more or less plausible than time travel Remember they went back in time in the original series too. Maybe Starbuck ran into Wolfman Jack too?

I still think that the four who have been apparently revealed to be cylons are not cylons at all. During the occupation of New Caprica they were "modified" to believe they were. These new personalities were turned on by some trigger.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I don't think there is a difference. All of Starbuck's observations were made from orbit, and were of a visual nature. It's probable that, unlike a Raptor, a Viper is not equipped with remote sensing equipment capable of making detailed observations about a planet's surface and atmosphere. It's simply not part of the mission requirement for a space-superiority fighter. And insofar as the MK-I Eyeball is concerned, it's not a very good instrument for making topological observations from orbit. During the day, you can't see cities from the space shuttle.

So, she looked around and took some pictures with the gun camera. She described the dominant colors of the planet (blue and green), the most obvious atmospheric feature (puffy white clouds) and decscibed the planet's moon and star simply as "yellow." She snapped pictures of the local star patterns, and remembers seeing "a giant gas planet with rings" on her way out.

None of this is in conflict with the planet that the Fleet landed on. Felix verified that the star patters matched, and from the beauty shot, we see a green / blue planet with puffy white clouds, with a yellow star behind it. Assuming that a long enough period of time elapsed between the (theoretical) nuclear war and the time that the fleet arrived- decades, if not centuries- then from space, the Earth would probably look more or less exactly as it does today.


Evidence of signifigant techlology? There's a bloody car sitting near the edge of the screen during the last few frames, and a skyline littered with ruined skyscrapers and bridges. That suggests a level of technology roughly equal to the rest of the 12 colonies, and we've only seen about 50 feet of a very large planet. Any sattelites they put up would have long ago decayed and re-entered, and it's probable that nobody has even bothered to look closely at the moon yet to see if there are any footprints on it.


I don't like it. They play the Time Travel card and the next thing you know we've got flying motorcycles and Boxy being allowed to play with his robotic dagget in CIC and go on dangeous landing missions. I am so glad we never saw that punk kid again after his first and only appearance. The instant he came on screen, I said to myself "Oh frak... They just jumped the shark."

The Cylons are allowed to get away with some amount of techno-magic because they're exotic, super-advanced beings who have labored in isolation for nearly half a century to prepare for their day of vengance. The Colonials, on the other hand, are just regular folk. They've got their Jump drive, and that's the limit of what they're allowed to do (even by accident) without stretching credibility to the breaking point. Even Resurrection (which is really the only super-exotic Cylon magic technology) was allowed to settle in and become an accepted part of the BSG reality before it was ever used as a plot device.


I'm not buying it. D'Anna saw their faces in the Temple on the Algae Planet and was sufficiently moved by it to commit suicide several times. The Old Man Hybrid predicted their fate rather specifically. There's just no plausible way out of it.

fmowry

iTrader: (8)

No offense but The Wire is 20 times better than the Sopranos as a series. The last two years of the Sopranos were almost unwatchable. Tony in a wife beater for the 100th time is hardly riveting television.

I'll bet you've never watched The Wire as I've never admittedly watched BSG. I did watch the Sopranos and there's just no comparison to The Wire.

One show is about gangsters whacking people, outsmarting the police, and showing how organized organized crime really is and the other is about fat Italian dudes eating spaghetti.

Frank

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Hear ye, hear ye. I am now officially resurrecting this corpse of a thread (get it- ressurection?) as I have two things to say.

First:I honestly can't remember if I had started watching The Wire at the time this was posted. It was somewhere in that general timeframe, but for all I know I may have been prompted to do so by the above post. At any rate, yes, it was a damned good show. Highly recommended.




And second:
Hot damn, did I call that one or what? And NO TIME TRAVEL!

jayc72

iTrader: (14)

Doh! You out nerded me!

b0ne

I discovered BSG a while back and watched everything on Netflix (couple years ago). I'm pretty sure I saw all the TV episodes, but now I'm confused since you're talking about having watched the last episode, today. Were they just reruns, or did they start it up again?

And Caprica Six is a dog. She needs to eat a sammich.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

No, the show ended last year. And the final episode, well, there's really no mistaking it. Pretty obvious that it was the FINAL episode. Hard to miss. I just happened to stumble across this old thread while searching for something totally un-related.


Hey, she's good enough for Baltar.


Oh, sidebar. I think I may have posted this somewhere else, but look who I ran into last month at a club in SD:



Yes, it's true. I am a geek.