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Now, the science is bullshit and might as well be magic most of the time, so it certainly isn't hard sci-fi or anything, but for doctor who, sci-fi is more than just scenery. The rules are much more rigid(typically) for something like BSG, but they don't matter as much to what is actually going on with the stories.
http://solidsaints.com/pools
Ya so I can appreciate those stories very much. I actually end up reading the Dr Who plots instead of watching the show haha.
In any case I appreciate the discussion. It would otherwise convince me to give BSG another chance if the final season didn't receive such overwhelmingly bad press.
I'd dispute the notion that there were "overall ideas" with respect to any kind of major arcs. I absolutely agree with you about RDM. I'll never watch anything by him again.
I thought the endings didn't make any sense. I think the final season did the opposite of pulling together. It spun out of control and relied on cool visuals and dramatic happenings to mask a nonexistent story.
I really gotta disagree with most of that, with the exception of the subplot involving Hera and her parents. That plot got really, really contorted and was the most religiously-tinged element in the whole show, so when the final reveal basically turned out to be nothing of any consequence whatsoever, it felt anticlimactic.
The ending doesn't really come together fully, but it really tries and wants to. It's more of an issue with the endings not feeling fully earned and fully fleshed-out than it is an issue of them not working.
And to say the show's story was "nonexistent" is just plain wrong. The show's story is fantastic.
I absolutely agree that in terms of the overarching plot BSG didn't really know how to tie up all the threads it had started, but in terms of the character arcs it stayed strong until the end IMO (with some iffy detours). Starbuck's final scene with Apollo, Adama and Roslyn, Baltar's "I know about farming..." - all of these worked for me.
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I gotta know your opinion on this. (season 4)
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Yeah, I don't cry at hardly anything, but Baltar reflecting on his future as a farmer? Hit me right in the feels.
Because it's becoming to me increasingly obvious that you just didn't like the plot and that it's not about this strange complaint about the "sci-fi-ness" of the story at all. Maybe you've got some other hangup here too with your silly definitions of sci-fi, but ultimately you seem disinterested in everything about the show, so the rest just seems like a silly nitpick.
Irrelevant distinction. This is your whole problem. Alot of the best of Star Trek is just like this. It doesn't fucking matter.
But anyway, let's look at this:
None of this makes any sense though. Why is there a flotilla of ships looking for water? Why is there a crew of prisoners? What do they need a detector for? Who is hunting them?
None of this works outside a spec-fic setting. Shit, the lie detector alone is sci-fi faffery.
It fits all three. It certainly fits the last two incredibly well. The setting jacks up the tension and the fact that it's spaceships and killer robots certainly qualify for "better for the story" and "more exciting" respectively. It also, imo, easily qualifies for the first since a flotilla on a years long voyage with no end in sight, pursued by a fleet of enemies doesn't really make much sense on water on earth.
You seem to have this really narrow definiton of sci-fi that you are only applying to this property. And this is why I come back to my first point above: because your arguments don't really make much sense so the impression I get is this is mostly that you just didn't like the show and the rest is excuses. It doesn't help that you keep mentioning the original BSG and linked that article from a guy who's argument is basically a lot of shitty arguments used to disguise that his main issues seems to be that it's a reboot and it's not campy like the original.
PS - 'Nugget' is actual airforce slang
Right, this comes back to a ridiculously narrow view of "sci-fi" that excludes tons of other sci-fi series and episodes.
I mean, you've gotten to the point where you are saying "sure, the context of this episode is sci-fi, but if you completely ignore it's context as part of a TV series and look at it as an isolated 42 minutes of television, it could totally work as non-sci-fi". I guess it's a statement. It's certainly not a complaint that makes any sense.
I think they pulled things together pretty well, but it felt like everything happened too quick. Sort of like Rome's last few episodes. It just had a feeling of "Holy shit! We gotta wrap this up and fast!"
That's not actually a logical train of thought. You finding it boring does not mean the story wasn't better or more fun for being sci-fi. You're completely ignoring the fact that something can be completely justified being set in sci-fi and still suck.
I think it all could have worked had they been consistent and intelligent with building the Cylon society. But it's so obvious that S3 and onwards, they were just throwing shit at the screen. I think S1 and S2 have vague but consistent ideas about what Cylons are about.
http://solidsaints.com/pools
Some themes are science fiction at their core.
http://solidsaints.com/pools
However BSG managed to make the story fit the scifi setting in a way that could not have been done with contemporary setting. It took people with a semi-modern sensibility and confront them with the existential drama of trying to preserve those sensibilities in the face of utter annihilation. In this way its not that different from any other post-apocalyptic series. However by ditching the world that we know(planet Earth), they could tell a story unencumbered by preconceived ideas.
Like Tom Zarek. In the real world the mere fact that he is in prison would color our ideas of him. The idea of a legitimate leader of political opposition coming from a prison population would be a hard sell. He would have been a thug and treated as such. Instead we got a self-proclaimed political idealist and this claim was treated with some legitimacy.
Or Religion. Having a debate about god that does not turn into a scripture quoting contest from the bible, but a real debate about why he allows bad things to happen. When people talk about the Cylon god, they never mention the Trinity for instance. They do debate the nature of a god that lets millions of people be slaughtered.
All of this because we abandoned Contemporary Earth for a setting in a completely new world. Since we don't have complete knowledge of the world we are forced to accept what the series told us. We cannot use our knowledge of the real world to avoid the story.
Cool, go with that if it makes you feel good.
No I don't ignore that at all, in fact that's more or less what I'm saying happened in BSG. My finding it boring means it wasn't more fun for being sci-fi in setting to ME. Purely subjective. It was justified being in the setting, I never disputed that. I even said I liked the setting and premise. I only said: "I just didn't think the stories it was telling were really any good" (emphasis on the plurality of story). One PART (and not nearly the only part) of why I didn't think the stories were any good was because the stories they were telling were more drama, or character, or military, or suspense, or thriller in nature, and the science fiction was more just the setting and not the focus of the episodes that I saw before giving up. To flip it around, if you were to take a show like The Wire and put it 100 years in the future with laser guns and high tech gadgets, hunting spacedrug dealers of their own creation, the setting would certainly be science fiction. But simply using these sci-fi tools to perform a stake-out and an arrest of a spacedrugs dealer is still just an episode about cops at the heart, but it could still be an awesome episode despite that if it happens to be an awesome episode about cops. I never said BSG wasn't science fiction. I just said the stories it was telling week to week were light on the sci-fi and heavy on the everything else. But what it was heavy on simply didn't do it for me for completely separate reasons. To me that's a missed opportunity. And as I've already conceded, maybe it gets a lot better with those themes later on. But I never gave it the chance.
This does not run in conflict with anything I have said and is true, but still.
Is that the one with Will Smith?
Fringe had some really egregious Sprint/Ford placements, but the best part was
I don't understand how an ending "tries and wants to" come together. I'm pretty sure the majority of the people wanted things to work out. It didn't. They wanted to hit that target, but they didn't. Is that what you mean? That they didn't is what I take issue with, but it's compounded by all the various plot arcs converging on something over the course of the series, with the big Shyamalan-style reveal being that the writers had no idea where they were going and they weren't David Lynch enough to make a clusterfuck seem like art.
Oh man.
Edit - Wrong word of choice in there.
American politics isn't 4D chess, it's just if you give a shit about other people or not.
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It was the last time they used that style so strongly though. It was weird, but it wasn't like, "Gawd fuhck this show uuuuuggggghhhh."
American politics isn't 4D chess, it's just if you give a shit about other people or not.
Thankfully, yes, they haven't gone in that direction since. If they'd done it again I really would have given up.
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
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As a former student of media it's actually really interesting seeing the production / writing differences between the seasons of Breaking Bad. 3 and 4 line up more in each way. But seasons 1 and 2 are so goddamn different from each other and the rest of the show.
I still need to poke at the first half of season 5 to be truly caught up. I hope it retained the style from season 3 and 4.
American politics isn't 4D chess, it's just if you give a shit about other people or not.
I can understand the disappointment over the muddled resolution of the arc involving the hybrid baby, considering how much weight that plot was given throughout most of the show, but they kind of wrote themselves into a corner with that one early onwards and there wasn't much they could do to course-correct as the show went on. They did resolve the plot, it just ended up feeling kind of anticlimactic.
As for everything else, I felt that it all pretty well resolved satisfactorily.