Crazy Talk
On a much less serious note, via Yglesias I see that Julian Sanchez has come up with a crazy prediction about the rest of Battlestar Galactica. It’s a nice try, but I’m afraid Sanchez is way off on this one. BSG spoilers abound in Sanchez’s post and in the post below. If you don’t want to know what happened in Friday’s episode, don’t read this post.
Since I deleted the post from several months ago when I predicted that Ellen Tigh would be the final Cylon, I cannot prove that I saw this coming for a long time (maybe one of my readers can corroborate the claim), but once I had seen “Revelations” (the last episode prior to the mid-season break) it became clear that the list of candidates for the fifth of the Five was extremely short. In other words, it had to be someone who had died prior to the exodus from New Caprica, and obviously it also had to be someone who had not died after the hub had been destroyed, and there are only a very few high-profile characters who fit that description. Once Tigh was revealed to be a Cylon, making his wife one as well is the obvious, increasingly lazy move that the BSG writers have naturally resorted to (just as they explained away almost every other personal relationship with a Cylon by revealing the “human” participants to be Cylons).
Sanchez cites Dualla’s first name, Anastasia, as evidence that she will be revealed as the twelfth model, but this simply doesn’t hold up. I credit Sanchez with his understanding of what Anastasia means and his attention to detail, but he is wrong. First of all, we have important external evidence that Kandyse McClure’s contract was limited to 13 episodes, which means that we will not be seeing her again. As she played what was very nearly my favorite character, this annoys me very much, but there it is. The evidence from the show is also quite compelling. It explains why Ellen appeared out of nowhere in middle of season 1, and it is consistent with the claim that the fifth was not in the fleet by the middle of season 4. As Cylons are supposed to regard suicide as a sin, and we have never seen a Cylon successfully commit suicide, it is implausible that one of the Five would do this, so Dualla cannot be the fifth, as much as her fans might like to see her return.
P.S. It occurred to me after seeing Friday’s episode that the major female characters on BSG are far more likely to suffer violent death or injury, and the more I thought about it the more it seemed that BSG is overflowing with images of violence against women. I suppose I don’t have any great insight about this, except to note that this is the case and it seems very unusual.
I don’t hold out hope that the series will be salvaged by the end. Ron Moore’s interview after the episode was aired made it clear that they were making things up as they went along–how can it not be a waste of time, ultimately? Would it have been that difficult to map things out more in advance?
Of course they’re making it up as they go along–they’re sci-fi writers for a show on cable. It is extremely hard to find sci-fi arc-plots that make sense, hold up under scrutiny and keep the audience’s interest. B-5 was probably the only sci-fi show that has ever succeeded at this.
As wastes of time go, it’s fairly enjoyable.
The internet does not forget
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May 2, 2008 9:32 PM
Reckless BSG Prediction
from Eunomia by Daniel Larison
Below is my bold and reckless prediction for tonight’s episode.
Ellen Tigh is the twelfth Cylon. That would be the perfect comic touch.
I found one of the comments in the thread to be far more reasonable, namely the one that (pretty much) said there has to be some god-like entity manipulating human-cylon relations for the show to make any sense at this point.
There are times in these last two season that I’ve really wished RDM stuck closer to the original, mostly because the established universe conventions he (and the other writers and producers) had to work with in DS9 created a more consistent, less frustrating product. One without BSG’s best moments (like most of season one), but still.
Babylon 5… I have heard that the DVD movie that was released a year or so ago was not that good. It’s too bad.
Thanks, CCG. As for the B-5 movie, it wasn’t up to the standards of the others they had made in previous years, and it was just barely tied into the rest of the show’s later story. There was also the difficulty that they had a skeleton cast, so there wasn’t much for them to do in the last one.
Daniel, I believe one of the six models committed suicide when setting of a nuke on one of the colonial ships. The nuke provided by Baltar.
Good point, Cord. That had slipped my mind. Still, she did that only after being tortured for months, so I would say it’s a pretty rare thing according to what we have seen.
Dee is meat. There’s no way around that. The suicide itself was a lame set-up to make you think Adama could be serious about ending himself, too. I found the whole episode annoying and self-indulgent. You’d think that having a planet full of archaeological evidence, the writers could have worked in a bit more of story, but I guess it was more important to let Olmos go into full Shatner mode.
It is extremely hard to find sci-fi arc-plots that make sense, hold up under scrutiny and keep the audience’s interest.
True, but the other shows tend not take themselves as seriously as BSG. Stargate, for example, never pretended to be anything more than a bit of fun. BSG is sold as some great work of art.
“Full Shatner mode”–good observation. I agree that the scene with Tigh wasn’t very credible. I mean, after going on this long and having survived the almost complete annihilation of humanity, why is this one death going to push him over the edge? The deaths of his son and wife never seemed to bring him to the brink, and neither did Kara’s, and he was obviously closer to all of them.
Had they spent more time elaborating on the background, they would have had to explain why there were centurion models there at all. It also seems to make complete nonsense of the entire established storyline that humans created Cylons, and that they then rebelled during the first war.
As for the great work of art problem, they did too good of a job in reinventing the show and improved on the original so much that everyone started taking the show more seriously than sci-fi shows should ever take themselves. The first season created expectations that they couldn’t keep meeting. Stargate on the other hand took a pulpy idea from a mediocre-but-amusing movie and worked overtime to make it even schlockier. There was no way to become too self-important with so much campy arch-villain overacting and all those ridiculous costumes. On the other hand, when you think that you are creating a gritty post-modern mythology, it is a lot harder to avoid these pitfalls.
Had they spent more time elaborating on the background, they would have had to explain why there were centurion models there at all. It also seems to make complete nonsense of the entire established storyline that humans created Cylons, and that they then rebelled during the first war.
Not really. They’ll work in the “this has all happened before” voodoo with a bit of a twist. You see, on this planet, it was the humans that did the nuking. That’s why the Cylons are so paranoid about the remnant fleet taking vengeance. You see, they know the real score, even if that knowledge is buried in their deep cybernetic, doohickey, subconscious programming.
On the other hand, when you think that you are creating a gritty post-modern mythology, it is a lot harder to avoid these pitfalls.
You are being way too forgiving, Daniel. That’s might Christian of you, I suppose. :)
From where I’m at, beginning with Roslin’s miracle Cylon cure, there have been obvious writing boners in episode after episode. There’s been too much of an effort to stick one shock after another into these shows. If you look at the first season, there’s not too many surprising (as in, zOMG!) moments. It all built up to Boomer capping the old man. The next half season was similarly structured. After the initial Pegasus episodes, the seasons lost any real sense of direction. It may be difficult, but it’s not impossible to maintain that kind of direction, even when you have to stick in a few filler shows.
Maybe they could square the new details with the original story, but it’s becoming harder and harder to keep track. The chronology just doesn’t hold up. On the whole, I don’t care, so long as they don’t try to reconcile the contradictions with stupid time-travel plotlines (as has been done on almost every Star Trek series).
When you listen to Moore talk on some of the early podcasts, the idea that they were making a new kind of hard-core, serious sci-fi show for a post-9/11 world was everywhere in his remarks. What is most annoying about this in the end is that Moore knows better than anyone that he is making a glorified space opera, but the conceit of the remake was that it couldn’t be just another space opera. It had to be *meaningful*, which is when the trouble in entertainment always begins. I say all of this as a great fan of the show, despite its increasingly wacky developments.
Admittedly, my enthusiasm has degraded into something of a hassenfreude, so I get unusually cranky about this show.
Given what we know of Moore, I don’t think there’ll be any time traveling. It’s just not his style in this show.
“Meaning” isn’t a bad thing. The problem with the show is that it often tries to make the meaning a little too one-to-one. It morphs from being a “mythology” into what Tolkein understood as an allegory. Often it descends into the ridiculous, like the case of secular Saul Tigh morphing into Mullah Tigh becoming (Shock!) the very thing he hates: a cylon! That was just such a laugh-out-loud, shark-jumping moment. How could this possibly get through so many people saying, “Wow, man, that’s cool, man! Go with it!”?
Michael Hogan was apparently embarrassed by the twists. Give him credit, though. He’s bravely soldiered on, making his character the central figure of the show. Kind of like what Larry Hagman did with J.R. Ewing. Forget Adama, Lee, Roslin and even Starbuck and Baltar. What I want to know is how Saul Tigh will come out of this.
I know Hogan hated the idea that Tigh was a Cylon, and frankly so did I. Irony is all very well, and having a Cylon lead the anti-Cylon resistance had its moments, but it didn’t match up with his character. Tigh is my favorite character on the show, and always has been. One good thing to come out of the last two seasons is that Tigh has emerged, as you said, as the most important character, so that’s something.