There’s an hour-long video on SciFi that recaps the major plot developments of Battlestar Galactica seasons 1 and 2. This will bring any newbie up to speed for Season 3, which just ended a couple of weeks ago.
Now, if only they’d do something like this for Lost…
Season 3 ends in March, and Season 4 was just greenlighted:
For a while, things looked iffy for “Battlestar Galactica.” After the Sci Fi Channel last month moved the third-season drama about a human resistance movement against an occupying race of robots from Friday nights to Sunday nights in an attempt to goose ratings, viewership remained stagnant.
The network has ruled, however, that the show won’t live by numbers alone: The Sci Fi Channel is expected to announce Tuesday that it has renewed the series for a fourth season. At least 13 new episodes will be produced this summer for a premiere next January.
The show’s audience has always been modest, especially when compared with those for basic cable’s “The Closer” and “Nip/Tuck,” which typically reach double or triple the audience of “Battlestar Galactica.” Since moving to 10 p.m. Sundays, the science-fiction show’s episodes have averaged 1.7 million viewers overall and 1.1 viewers ages 18 to 49, the key demographic targeted by advertisers.
But “Battlestar Galactica” stands as one of the most critically acclaimed series on television. It also won the prestigious Peabody Award and was counted among the American Film Institute’s top 10 outstanding TV programs two years in a row. Critics often describe the show in lofty terms, referring to it as a multilayered allegory for a post-9/11 world that raises questions about the ethics and politics of war.
The Sci Fi Channel cites the series’ strong buzz and critical praise - a halo effect that can’t be quantified in ratings points or ad dollars - as the reason for its renewal.
I am thankful. Ratings alone shouldn’t be the sole driver for a series viability; the article mentions that strong DVD sales were also taken into account. Ultimately if you cater towards ratings and nothing else, you are explicitly aiming for least-common denominator fare. That about fits my low expectations for broadcast TV but SciFi, as a cable network, knows better.
That said, am I a hypocrite? I don’t actually contribute to the Galactica revenue stream in any way directly. If I had the option of a la carte cable, SciFi would be on my list of channels I’d pay for in a nanosecond. I’d also be willing to pay a dollar or two if I could download the episodes to burn to DVD without commercial breaks. But that’s not an option either. So I have to torrent the show to stay current; and Galactica’s future remains under threat for want of revenue. Surely the cable companies and content providers have an incentive to offer me, the consumer, better models for consumption? Wouldn’t we all benefit? Except for producers of reality television, of course. They must have a good lobby.
updated character sketches of the BSG cast, rendered as Simpsons characters. Awesome.
via Don, this great short Q&A about Cylons. In a nutshell: they have souls, and they are human by any reasonable spiritual sense of the word.
This reminds me of the recent piece in Wired about extreme atheists like Richard Dawkins. Notable exchange, between the author (an agnostic) and reknowned philosopher Daniel Dennett:
It interests me that, though Dennett is an atheist, he does not see faith merely as a useless vestige of our primitive nature, something we can, with effort, intellectualize away. No rational creature, he says, would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things.
“Would intelligent robots be religious?” it occurs to me to ask.
“Perhaps they would,” he answers thoughtfully. “Although, if they were intelligent enough to evaluate their own programming, they would eventually question their belief in God.”
And therein lies the Cylons’ angst in a nutshell.
Steven endorsed this nitpicker post about the Cylons on the new Galactica show, so I feel somewhat compelled to respond.
But the bottom line about Galactica is that it’s classic literary science fiction, not camp. In other words, it takes moral and social issues of relevance to our society, translates them to a en exotic and futuristic setting, and then investigates them in a way that - because of the alien setting - allows that examination to be largely objective and free of the real-world partisan nonsense. That doesn’t stop partisans on both sides to try and claim the show for their own purposes: the left thinks that New Caprica was a metaphor for Iraq, the right thinks that Cylons are muslims, etc. But these are shallow analyses, and not limited to Galactica. The real point is to examine things like democratic ideals, the tension between military and civilian rule, the ethics of resistance and suicide bombing, and reason vs faith, all within a “neutral” frame. In doing so we can return to the basic principles that define us and test them to see how they fare against each other. Its good that Galactica inspires such political commentary. It’s a stimulator of debate, a fresh perspecctive, that upends our assumptions while remaining true to our principles and ideals. It is a show that makes you think, and if you’re watching it just to critique the technobabble, you’re not watching the same show we are. Which is fine; to each his own.
But with respect to Galactica that I’m watching, it’s the truest heir to Heinlein, Asimov, Dick, Ellison, and the other giants of literary science fiction that has ever made the jump to the screen since Star Trek: The Next Generation. Those who nitpick it remind me of those who dismiss anime as “japanese cartoons” or who insist that if you didn’t like Anime series XYZ it’s because you “didn’t get it”.
Heck, forget defending the nitpicker with regard to the cylons on specifics. If you watch the show, you see the flaws anyway. The argument above is the more important one.
UPDATE: Otto mentions that my link to his post was only to the extended entry - the correct full link is here. I’d read the full post myself and anyone reading his post will immediately understand that Otto is a fan too. As he himself emphasises, it’s a nitpick, not an indictment.
But how can it not know what it is? –Blade Runner
I think it is pretty dim to be offended by percieved Iraq analogy in BattleStar. I guess these are the same people that see dhimmitude in the bend of a blade of grass these days.
BSG is so much more. BSG asks the same question that Kikaku Kidotai (GitS II: Innosensu) and Blade Runner, and countless scifi series and novels ask, can a machine be human? Which is really a paraphrase of what does it mean to be human?
The questions about torture and suicide bombing; is it ever ok to torture? what if it is a machine? is it ok to suicide bomb? what if the explodees are machines (ie, not human)? are not just about Iraq. How impoverished must be the imaginations that only see the 2-D representation.
BSG is a sort of intellectual field lab for asking those question, which need to be answered in the next thirty years, because of the advent of the Singularity.
But also, I am interested in the Friendliness Problem for Strong AI, because, if we could solve the problem for AIs, couldn’t we solve it for homosapiens? Or, does it mean that as machines become more human they become less Friendly?
In Innosensu, when the gynoids kill their masters, it turns out that they can violate the prime directive because they have become part human thru the Locus Solus process of ghost-dubbing. The Bladerunner skin-jobs can kill their makers because they have become too human, ie just like us. But perhaps in the end, the skinjobs can be come more than human, as when Roy saved Detective Deckard. Or is that truly human? Is the saving grace of humanity compassion and mercy and love? And will we see the cylons achieve it too?
via AICN - you can watch the first 12 minutes of Galactica season 3 online at scifi.com. That’s a direct link to the video at scifi, via AICN.
Three words. Kara Thrace badass.
(UPDATE: the season 3 preview is now at http://www.scifi.com/firstlook/battlestar_03/)
Some thoughts on the opener and the preceding “webisodes” below the fold… including why I might find myself rooting for the collaborators! (more…)
ok so this time I have a good excuse for not posting! the first week of fasting is always the toughest 
The funny thing is that I’ve found myself thinking about adding a food category to the blog (primarily a paean to Chipotle). But food blogging during Ramadan would be just masochistic, so it will have to wait until Eid.
There has been a lot of stuff going on though. Galactica season 3 starts soon, and there have been online “webisodes” at Scifi.com that have a very interesting prequel storyline to the season that really delves into the resistance fighter mentality - with our own sympathetic and loved characters making decisions that we would normally decry. It’s odd how I am willing to give a fictional character more slack and make excuses for their behavior that I condemn in the real world - like strong weapons in a shrine. Of course the Cylons are Evil Incarnate (or are they?) so the universe of Galactica is more black and white (or is it?).
Also the Intel Developer Forum is going on and has all sorts of awesome, sharikou-head-exploding stuff like 80-core chips, roadmaps to 45nm processing, and laser FSBs (from Day 1 alone). Anandtech has probably the best coverage. Yesterday during Day 2 they also talked about the Santa Rosa platform, one of my particular interests. One tidbit I’d missed earlier: the FSB clock frequency will also be adjustable, to further improve power management. Right now on the new Centrino platforms running Yonah/Merom, only CPU clock speeds adjust, but the FSB runs at full all the time. And there are even cooler innovations to reduce power that I won’t spoil. The promise of all-day computing gets stronger and stronger.
Shamus’ “DM of the Rings” comic is awesome. I almost choked with laughter at the whole “Leggo my ass” thing. It reminds me of Summoner Geeks - but better.
And Sugar is still losing to a demented penguin. Oh, the humanity!
Sci-Fi will be offering free downloads of past Galactica episodes, along with previews of new episodes:
NBC Universal Cable and Sci Fi Channel will debut never-before-seen recap special Battlestar Galactica: The Story So Far via free-on-demand and broadband prior to the premiere of the series’ third season on Sci Fi Oct. 6.
Beginning Aug. 28, viewers will have access to Battlestar Galactica: The Story So Far; select full-length episodes from seasons one and two; and a two-minute weekly sneak peek of upcoming episodes from the new season.
In related news, recall that there’s a Galactica prequel series named “Caprica” in development, which will be set 50 years prior to the present one. It’s going to be a “family drama set in the corporate world“, not an explicitly sci-fi premise apart from its setting. Well, the Cylons will be there as humanity’s handmaidens, though given that in the Galactica pilot we saw the old “man in suit” Cylon of the 70’s show in a museum case, one wonders what the Cylons in the Caprica show will look like…
Season 3 premieres on Sci Fi on October 6th.
Also some spoilers via AICN below the fold… (more…)
