So you folks like BSG, huh? Ready to trash talk the plot lines 
Seriously, I have watched every single BSG episode including the Pegasus director’s cut. Before anyone starts shooting energy beams up my six, I am a fan. But I’ve been thinking about the last few of episodes and they are definitely losing this fan, episode-by-episode. Especially the current one with Baltar’s defense counsel. Puhleez! Lords of Cobol save me from grandstanding cowboy defense attorneys!
But, I digress. Actually, the producers are losing this fan not all at once with anything monumental. It’s more akin to death by a thousand cuts performed by bad writing. consider this: Am I the only fan who "gets it" that the mandala, central to all this hocus-pocus nonsense with Kara Thrace and the search for earth is actually a simple representation of syzygy, the alignment of The Sun, Earth and Moon? DUH!
How long must we suffer through endless jump cuts and dreamscapes until they reveal what is painfully obvious. I got the syzygy mandala map when I first saw it on the planetfall episode. Man, they sure are milking that artifice for a multi-episodic story arc.
Honestly BSG fans, what started out as a wonderful series with excellent visuals, decent scripts episode-after-episode, and sensational acting (especially for a sci-fi space opera) -- has really taken a nose dive this season. IMHO. I think the writers and certainly the executive producer are taking themselves WAY too mystically this time out. And the writers are not good enough to pull it off. They are telegraphing the big revelations to come in a rather clumsy way. Are we finally done with that hardass psycho pilot Starbuck? Probably not. Being vaporized in a gas giant implosion should have been the first clue :-) No corpse, no autopsy. Oh, we’ll see Kara again. Just as Spock was resurrected, so to shall Starbuck. The writers try too hard to implement the "nothing is as it seems" mantra. And it ain't working, in this fan's opinion. Everything is a wee bit too obvious.
And, while I'm at it, the messy masala of a polytheistic society that has maintained traditional racist castes which suddenly develops the moral and ethical fabric to create unions and collective bargaining is a bad joke. The best the polytheistic societies on this tiny blue planet ever came up with were trade guilds. There is a fundamental leap of social and religious evolution that had to happen to evolve past polytheism to monotheism and respect for individual rights that is actually the cornerstone of Judaism before Earthly societies could develop those institutions. OK, so in the BSG world it took a different track? Nah, not buying it. Not when the series is going to end one of two ways: (IMHO)
1. They come to Earth, have a final genocidal showdown with the Cylons and the remaining human survivors become the ancient Greeks or,
2. They find earth and the lost tribe that landed here and founded Hellenistic society. There will be some good explanation for the loss of all that fancy technology.
Tell me something I don't already know please, tick tock, life is too short :-)
It's the same sort of metaphysical-babble BS that tanked ST DS9 at the end of its run with all that Celestial Temple, Pah Wraith, messenger of the Prophets, good versus evil silliness. One of the best things about ST TNG, for example, was the absence of all that crap. Same with Voyager. But, I digress, yet again.
The BSG producers and writers are stuck in some higher calling God groove and lost in space. (OK, bad pun.)
IMHO, space operas always work best when they ignore the metaphysical weirdness and just stick to the laws of physics wrapped around a damned fine story line. For example, even Star Trek physics. After all, the transporter was invented to save on expensive production costs whenever the crew needed to make a planetfall. Nothing very fancy there. NBC was just being cheap. But even in that, the ST team managed to factor in the Heisenberg Principle and while the solution was not at hand in our time, they simply invented Heisenberg Compensators for the transporter system and its, "3 to beam up, energize."
You would think the BSG boys-n-girls would have figured all this out. In good sci fi writing, it's OK to suspend belief, not put your brains on hold. BTW, I have been a die-hard sci-fi fan since I first learned to read at age 4. Used to write sci-fi short stories back in the day as a teenager. Prayed at the altar of the greats: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Rod Serling, DC Fontana, Roddenberry, etc. Lived long enough to see that some of their wild fantasies, were not so wild after all. Like personal communicators, directed energy weapons, communications satellites, artificial intelligence, robotics, yada-yada-yada. Somehow, drunken and disturbed fighter pilots, Cylon babes, and improbable story lines are not quite cutting it for this sci-fi lad.
Your thoughts, BSG fans?
Seriously, I have watched every single BSG episode including the Pegasus director’s cut. Before anyone starts shooting energy beams up my six, I am a fan. But I’ve been thinking about the last few of episodes and they are definitely losing this fan, episode-by-episode. Especially the current one with Baltar’s defense counsel. Puhleez! Lords of Cobol save me from grandstanding cowboy defense attorneys!
But, I digress. Actually, the producers are losing this fan not all at once with anything monumental. It’s more akin to death by a thousand cuts performed by bad writing. consider this: Am I the only fan who "gets it" that the mandala, central to all this hocus-pocus nonsense with Kara Thrace and the search for earth is actually a simple representation of syzygy, the alignment of The Sun, Earth and Moon? DUH!
How long must we suffer through endless jump cuts and dreamscapes until they reveal what is painfully obvious. I got the syzygy mandala map when I first saw it on the planetfall episode. Man, they sure are milking that artifice for a multi-episodic story arc.
Honestly BSG fans, what started out as a wonderful series with excellent visuals, decent scripts episode-after-episode, and sensational acting (especially for a sci-fi space opera) -- has really taken a nose dive this season. IMHO. I think the writers and certainly the executive producer are taking themselves WAY too mystically this time out. And the writers are not good enough to pull it off. They are telegraphing the big revelations to come in a rather clumsy way. Are we finally done with that hardass psycho pilot Starbuck? Probably not. Being vaporized in a gas giant implosion should have been the first clue :-) No corpse, no autopsy. Oh, we’ll see Kara again. Just as Spock was resurrected, so to shall Starbuck. The writers try too hard to implement the "nothing is as it seems" mantra. And it ain't working, in this fan's opinion. Everything is a wee bit too obvious.
And, while I'm at it, the messy masala of a polytheistic society that has maintained traditional racist castes which suddenly develops the moral and ethical fabric to create unions and collective bargaining is a bad joke. The best the polytheistic societies on this tiny blue planet ever came up with were trade guilds. There is a fundamental leap of social and religious evolution that had to happen to evolve past polytheism to monotheism and respect for individual rights that is actually the cornerstone of Judaism before Earthly societies could develop those institutions. OK, so in the BSG world it took a different track? Nah, not buying it. Not when the series is going to end one of two ways: (IMHO)
1. They come to Earth, have a final genocidal showdown with the Cylons and the remaining human survivors become the ancient Greeks or,
2. They find earth and the lost tribe that landed here and founded Hellenistic society. There will be some good explanation for the loss of all that fancy technology.
Tell me something I don't already know please, tick tock, life is too short :-)
It's the same sort of metaphysical-babble BS that tanked ST DS9 at the end of its run with all that Celestial Temple, Pah Wraith, messenger of the Prophets, good versus evil silliness. One of the best things about ST TNG, for example, was the absence of all that crap. Same with Voyager. But, I digress, yet again.
The BSG producers and writers are stuck in some higher calling God groove and lost in space. (OK, bad pun.)
IMHO, space operas always work best when they ignore the metaphysical weirdness and just stick to the laws of physics wrapped around a damned fine story line. For example, even Star Trek physics. After all, the transporter was invented to save on expensive production costs whenever the crew needed to make a planetfall. Nothing very fancy there. NBC was just being cheap. But even in that, the ST team managed to factor in the Heisenberg Principle and while the solution was not at hand in our time, they simply invented Heisenberg Compensators for the transporter system and its, "3 to beam up, energize."
You would think the BSG boys-n-girls would have figured all this out. In good sci fi writing, it's OK to suspend belief, not put your brains on hold. BTW, I have been a die-hard sci-fi fan since I first learned to read at age 4. Used to write sci-fi short stories back in the day as a teenager. Prayed at the altar of the greats: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Rod Serling, DC Fontana, Roddenberry, etc. Lived long enough to see that some of their wild fantasies, were not so wild after all. Like personal communicators, directed energy weapons, communications satellites, artificial intelligence, robotics, yada-yada-yada. Somehow, drunken and disturbed fighter pilots, Cylon babes, and improbable story lines are not quite cutting it for this sci-fi lad.
Your thoughts, BSG fans?
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