Battlestar Galactica

[smuncky]

TVGuide.com: Why did you choose to end the show with Six and Baltar walking through Times Square?
Moore: Two things: One, Dave Eick and I had the image of number Six walking through Times Square in her red dress a couple of years ago. We thought potentially that that was just a great visual note to end on. And that also came out of the idea that we eventually wanted the show to directly relate to us. That the show was always intended to be relevant and be current to our society and lives and that it wasn't completely escapist — "Oh here's a story about a bunch of people who are not related to us on Earth at all." We wanted it to ultimately circle back and say look, these people were our forbearers; in a real sense what happened to them, could happen to us. Look around you. Wake up. Think about the society that you live in and we wanted to make that literal at the end.

TVGuide.com: Can you explain the idea behind using "All Along the Watchtower" as a sort of unconscious constant for both Cylons and humans?
Moore: I was always fascinated by the idea that music is this thing that musicians catch out of the air, from the ether. They just pluck it out of nowhere and you hear it and it's beautiful and moving, and it touches us in a way that we can't even understand. Well, where does it come from? It feels like it lives somehow in the collective unconscious or it's a constant in the universe. So, here's a song that transcends the eons and that was around and was somehow divinely inspired or has some connection to the greater energy of the universe. It existed tens of thousands of years ago, and through time people somehow heard it, plucked it out of the air and shared it with the people around them. That happed with Anders, to Kara and it happened to Bob Dylan!

TVGuide.com: I know this is a Sophie's Choice kind of decision, but do you have a favorite moment from the finale?
Moore: I think the moment when Kara jumps the ship and when we pan up seeing the Earth rise up from the moon was probably my favorite moment because it really is the end point — in terms of story — from where we began. I mean that was the promise from the miniseries that we'll find a place called Earth, and here it is. So there was a tremendous amount of satisfaction seeing that finally happen.

TVGuide.com: And it was such a gorgeous shot...
Moore: It was inspired by two different photos: the famous shot they took on Apollo 8 of Earth's rise over the moon, and then the actual image of Earth we used. We drew upon the Apollo 17 shot — there's a big famous picture of the full Earth that they took on Apollo 17, so we took liberties with both of those and combined them.

TVGuide.com: Any word on when we'll get to see the final prequel movie, "The Plan?"
Moore: Don't have a date for it yet, but they said that it's gonna be in the fall some time, possibly in November. But, there's no firm date for that.

TVGuide.com: What's the deal with this Battlestar movie that's being made — it's not your version of Battlestar?
Moore: Well I don't really know anything about it. They didn't talk to me before they made the deal with Glen Larson, so I don't really know much about it.

TVGuide.com: So they never approached you about a movie?
Moore: Nope. They never picked up the phone. Let's put it that way. But that's OK because I had kind of put the word out that for quite a while that I didn't think that our version of Galactica was going to lend itself to a feature film. I knew that we wanted to end the series the way that we did, and it really wraps up the show. There's really not a story to tell after the finale that would be Battlestar Galactica.

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Battlestar-Galacticas-Ron-1004256.aspx?rss=news&partnerid=spi&profileid=05

 

[cacruden]

Why walk away from technology?

Insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

 

[Hypnotoad]

Consider myself to be a superfan. And I loved this finale.

It had all the important elements, still left much to the imagination and resolved many of the characters. The Opera House sequence was probably my favourite and I could have lived without Cavil being such a turd. Beautiful ending, really.

 

[MisterF]

The Cylons didn't disappear. Humans and Cylons interbred creating "modern" Humans. Hera was mitochondrial Eve. Just the oldest first modern human.

But most of the people settled on other continents, totally losing contact with each other. So their descendents would have been completely human, not human-cylon hybrids. Of course, that's only if they didn't all starve to death because they didn't have any technology. Or if they didn't all get killed by the natives....

Why walk away from technology?

Insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

[*]Baltar, he always had one of the more complex characters and it was a shame he basically spent the last while in that randome hareem. James Callis played the part and I felt he was the one character who had a complete arc from begining to end.

I liked Baltar as a character up until the trial. After that it's like the writers didn't know what to do with him until the finale.

 

[afransen]

My favourite part of the series will remain the Baltar and Head Six scenes from the earlier seasons. Brilliant.

Overall, I think they managed to land this thing somewhat gracefully. Yes there are some inconsistencies and plot holes that might have been avoided had they had a plan from say, beginning of season two of how to wind it down. Alas, they were mostly winging it. Given the corner they had painted themselves into, it couldn't really turn out any other way.

I liked the final scene with Kara. It was nice, if a bit hokey.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

What I really don't get is the bit with the two Earths - and how they can be so geographically similiar (if not identical). I do love how they worked out the roles of Baltar and Six - it's almost like they're the "Adam & Eve".

AoD

 

[OttoSchloss]

But most of the people settled on other continents, totally losing contact with each other. So their descendents would have been completely human, not human-cylon hybrids. Of course, that's only if they didn't all starve to death because they didn't have any technology. Or if they didn't all get killed by the natives....


Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!


I liked Baltar as a character up until the trial. After that it's like the writers didn't know what to do with him until the finale.

Well the ones in South America and Australia probably didn't survive since there were no people living there 150,000 year ago. The idea was that Hera was the original human. So all humans would in some way have her dna. Which means that the human only ancestor were not the ones that survived but the human cylon hybrids were.

It would have made more sense if they had landed say 38,000 years ago when humans were almost completely annihilated from this planet (we're descended from the couple thousand that survived). Or even 10000 years ago which is our earliest evidence for agriculture (but I think the Sphinx is even older).

 

[Hypnotoad]

idea was that Hera was the original human. So all humans would in some way have her dna. Which means that the human only ancestor were not the ones that survived but the human cylon hybrids were.

The point was that Hera is /was Mitochondrial Eve. She's the most recent ancestor to all humans all of us can somehow trace our DNA to her's. Research puts this at about 140,000 years ago or so. That's why landing 38,000 years ago or something would void the story element.

She's the savior of both races, in a literal and figurative sense.

 

[Hypnotoad]

What I really don't get is the bit with the two Earths - and how they can be so geographically similiar (if not identical). I do love how they worked out the roles of Baltar and Six - it's almost like they're the "Adam & Eve".

AoD

First Earth (not ours) is a different planet that is different. It was the 13th colony, the origin of the original cylon race. That fact that it went by the name "Earth" in the Pythia scrolls and that fact that we call our planet Earth are two seperate things.Probably an accident or a coincidence. But they are not the same planets.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

CSW2424:

Oh I know - but as I recall, the 13th tribe Earth seems to have been depicted in space with North America in it; whereas the new Earth has Africa...

AoD

 

[MisterF]

The point was that Hera is /was Mitochondrial Eve. She's the most recent ancestor to all humans all of us can somehow trace our DNA to her's. Research puts this at about 140,000 years ago or so. That's why landing 38,000 years ago or something would void the story element.

She's the savior of both races, in a literal and figurative sense.

That only makes sense if they all lived in the same area and barely survived. But if most of them settled on other continents and founded civilizations there, as the episode suggests, their descendents wouldn't have had any DNA connection to Hera whatsoever.

 

[Whoaccio]

So, I've been thinking about BSG. I keep wondering what *I* would do if I landed on Earth 350,000 years ago. Where would we settle, how would public policy issues be resolved, how will we meet economic needs? Is it even possible to maintain a modern society with only 40k people?

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Whoaccio:

So, I've been thinking about BSG. I keep wondering what *I* would do if I landed on Earth 350,000 years ago. Where would we settle, how would public policy issues be resolved, how will we meet economic needs? Is it even possible to maintain a modern society with only 40k people?

My hunch is - unless that exodus is well prepared ahead of time, with a clear understanding of the process of rebuilding modern society involves (that's ignoring the political feasiblity such an operation would be - assuming that everyone is rational and will do the right thing), I think it's extremely unlikely one can maintain a modern society as we know it.

I mean, think about how dependent our society is on the specialization of labour (and knowledge behind such labour). Just to give an example - computers - the manufacturing of which requires a huge amount of specialization - from chip design to resource extraction and processing (ultrapure silicon crystal) to manufacturing (Fab plants) - all of which are multi-billion dollar endeavours that's not likely replicated by such a small population. Now, one could get by without having to build such things (and other high-tech products) if a) there are low tech alternatives that are accessible and/or b) there is an initial supply of such products that would last for awhile until such time it becomes feasible to build such things and/or c) the initial supply is of such durable nature that would lead to the same - otherwise, key planks of technological society will start falling right off. Given the focus will probably be related to matters of survival at first (food, shelter, resource location), that can be a critical issue when labour (represented by the small size of the initial population) is scarce.

That's in addition to the issue of how knowledge (practical and abstract) can be communicated to the coming generations before critical gaps started appearing.

Remember how in the first (or second?) episode Roslin convinced Adama to start running and have children in order to save humanity instead of engaging in a heroic final confrontation with the Cylons? Numbers matter...

AoD

 

[Whoaccio]

Yea... computers were the first thing I thought of in the context of labor specialization as well. I suppose the best thing the first generation could do would be to ensure a stable food supply and, most importantly, write down ALL of their knowledge in a kind of Asimovian encyclopedia. Without having to reinvent things like steam engines or printing presses (or FTL drives, I guess...), recovery would probably be cut down from 350,000 years to maybe a millennium or two. The key issue would be developing this kind of wiki on a medium which wouldn't degrade overtime.

The one weird developmental quirk that could arise would be if, generations on, society had come to worship such an encyclopedia as divine.

I figure the best place to settle would probably be somewhere in one of the major river deltas (Pearl, Nile, Yellow, Irrawaddy, Ganges), though these are all susceptible to flooding.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Whoaccio:

I thought something akin to modern era society (Maybe around 1900? Industrial era perhaps?) can be sustained so long as certain extreme-tech products are excluded. Like - if society stick to four main focus - 1. basic needs - farming, shelter - obvious reasons; 2. resource location and extraction (think: oil, coal as the basis of the chemical industry - plastic, fuels, fertilizers, etc.; minerals - copper, iron enabling the production of machinery and electricity), 3. knowledge retention, transfer and selective education (archival of non-essential knowledge, teaching of ways to understand this body of knowledge, critical skills supporting the first 2 points as well as scientific method and logic for retention of problem solving capacity) 4. reproduction and some level of medical knowledge (esp. with regards to hygiene /public health and infectious disease - think what mortality rates from say the plague can do to a society with only 40K population) - recovery might be swift?

The other problem is that knowledge is different from skills - we can probably clobber together enough knowledge to build a steam engine on paper - but to convert raw materials and work them into the suitable metals components with suitable tolerances to actually make it work is probably a big issue since few would have the knowledge to see through the entire process. It might be easier to go for other pathways - such as building an electrical generator (the simple forms requires only copper coils and magnets) powered by say wind or moving water - which requires a lot less metal components.

The one weird developmental quirk that could arise would be if, generations on, society had come to worship such an encyclopedia as divine.

The "Memorabilia" in A Canticle for Leibowitz comes to mind.

I figure the best place to settle would probably be somewhere in one of the major river deltas (Pearl, Nile, Yellow, Irrawaddy, Ganges), though these are all susceptible to flooding.

Plus and minuses - coastal area offers the benefit of fishing as a food source, as well as the inherit soil fertility of flood plains and the river as avenue of transportation with boating - but it could be subjected to extreme weather events and might be poor in terms of minerals?

AoD