I spent a while idly channel-surfing after we watched the final couple of episodes of Martian Successor Nadesico last night, and ran across the new Battlestar Galactica on the Sci-Fi Channel. Lots of smart people like the show, but I didn't get into the premiere, and the occasional attempt to watch it in sub-optimal circumstances hasn't really convinced me of its brilliance. The few clips I saw last night didn't really help, either, though they might be considered spoilers, so I'll put them after the cut:
On the first pass, I saw them explaining that there's some virus infecting the Cylons, and for technobabble reasons, they could control but not cure the disease. This fact was used to induce some diseased Cylon prisoners to provide them with crucial information, which in turn led to a genius plan to destroy the Cylons once and for all.
All they needed to do was to put themselves in range of a Cylon fleet, and then execute the (helpless and plague-infected) prisoners, who would then be uploaded by the Cylons, taking the virus with them. The virus would then run through all the Cylon ships, exterminating the entire race.
Gee, do you think you stacked the moral deck enough, there? Are you sure the plan wouldn't work better if you were simultaneously drinking the blood of unbaptized kittens?
A later pass caught the crucial moment, when the Cylon fleet appears, and Supreme Commander Lt. Castillo orders the execution of the prisoners. At which point, the execution team swings into action, and marches through a quarter mile of miscellaneous passageways, and three sets of locked doors before reaching the cell containing the prisoners, only to find that they're already dead (presumably helped by a character who turned up in the next scene, looking angst-ridden, though I didn't stick around long enough to find out).
If the whole plan depends on executing the sick and helpless at exactly the right moment, shouldn't your death squad be, I don't know, in the same place as the prisoners? Maybe in the next room over? Perhaps with a doctor on staff, to make sure they don't die too soon?
I realize I'm being hugely unfair to the show, slagging it on the basis of a couple of five-minute excerpts, but it's hard to imagine a context in which these things wouldn't bug me.
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You saw bits of a sub-par episode. Normally, the moral dilemmas are far more grey than black and white. That's what makes the show special.
This moral dilemma wasn't black and white, it was just white. The genocide decision was a no brainer when they've already wiped out 99.999% of your side, show ever sign of being able and willing to finish the job, and you have absolutely zero chance of prevailing military and only an uncertain but surely not high chance of permanently escaping.
That said, the execution procedure was dumb and this was probably the worst episode of this season. The other candidate...the premiere.
Granted that I stopped watching after the miniseries, which I thought frankly awful, but ... I read something recently (in Slate, maybe?) about how the previous seasons were - not intended to be perhaps but were - neocons' favorite tv, but that this season was switching moral positions with an astonishing rapidity. Perhaps the writing is suffering as a result.
ps - wasn't Nadesico great?
(And this "wait before you add something" is annoying ... though probably not as annoying as a lot of spam)
The creative minds behind BG are totally lacking in all respects with regards to creating a viable science fiction sereies. Do they lack for anyone to criticize their scripts or their first pilots? This thing is dead wood.
Gee, do you think you stacked the moral deck enough, there? Are you sure the plan wouldn't work better if you were simultaneously drinking the blood of unbaptized kittens?
BG does have its clunky moments; but I'm not sure I quite follow this part of your reasoning. The Cylons, after all, have already launched, in the name of God, a genocidal attack on the entire human race, reducing the population of the human race from a sprawling, thriving civilization of about twenty billion people to less than fifty thousand refugees; they then harrassed most of them across large regions of space, slowly but steadily picking them off; in the meantime they subjected the rest to torture and nasty breeding experiments; then, after a few Cylons began to have a few doubts about whether God actually had wanted them to annihilate the humans, some of them decided that instead of annihilating the human race, they should perhaps try the experiment of living in peace with them -- by establishing a fascist puppet state over them, torturing or killing anyone who objected. Finally (and for the first time) turning the tables is hardly kitten-sacrificing dubious, morally wrong though it certainly is.
But Miguelito is right that things are usually more gray-shaded; and, the BG universe being what it is, everyone will pay up the nose later for the fact that they didn't manage to eliminate the Cylons when they had the chance.
"The creative minds behind BG are totally lacking in all respects with regards to creating a viable science fiction sereies. Do they lack for anyone to criticize their scripts or their first pilots? This thing is dead wood."
No, Deadwood was on HBO.
More seriously: Shows that are "dead wood" tend not to win things like Hugo awards, or a Peabody.
Let me echo others that have said that the moral dilemmas are usually presented in a far more grey area than last night's.
However, there was at least a token attempt at "grey area" in the show last night. There are 41k people running from an entire race that's already wiped out most of what used to be the human race. If you don't consider Cylons people, or alive in any particular sense, is it genocide when you wipe them out? Is it bad to pull the plug on something mankind created which has since mostly destroyed man?
"about how the previous seasons were - not intended to be perhaps but were - neocons' favorite tv, but that this season was switching moral positions with an astonishing rapidity. Perhaps the writing is suffering as a result."
Strange. I hear that about 24 far more often than I hear that about BSG.
And I've not really seen what they're doing as switching moral positions. The situation on New Caprica wasn't some ham-fisted analogue for Iraq, as much as that's how it was probably read by Freepers. There were bits and pieces from Vietnam, and from plenty of other occupations. Hell, the last episode of season 2, we get a shot of the Cylons marching down the streets of the city on New Caprica that's right out of Paris getting taken over by the Nazis.
To reply to Chad's post:
You, Chad, missed the conversation where a character stood up and said, "Wait! This is fundamentally wrong, and we shouldn't do it. If we do, we're no better than they are when it comes to genocidal actions." And I think it didn't help that you caught two tiny pieces of the conclusion of a two-parter. But then, I also think BSG is one of several shows that plays a lot better on DVD than it does serialized out over a season of TV.
The show has had its less than stellar moments (eg: the bizarre noirish episode with Apollo last season that was just a total misfire), but it does deserve more of a fair shake than you've given it here (and I think you fairly acknowledge as much).
It sounds like I'm being hyperbolic when I say this, but I'm not: When the new BSG is at its best, it is far and away the best show currently being made. The acting, the scripts, the characters, and on, and on, it all just works. They do an unbelievable job of creating characters and then staying true to that person's nature. They've also done a pretty great job of letting the moral situations that arise in the plot play out in a way that doesn't seem hollow.
It's not that I'm annoyed at the morality of exterminating the Cylons, so much as the ham-fisted way they went about making the decision to do it as unpalatable as possible. It's like they were afraid that people wouldn't catch that it was a moral dilemma unless they really hammered home the point-- not only is it genocide, it's genocide by means of executing prisoners! Sick and wounded and lonely prisoners! This is Bad Stuff, folks!
I did see the bit where one character points out that genocide is wrong, I just didn't mention it in the snark-a-thon.
Nadesico was a lot of fun, but boy, it ends weirdly.
It was a bad episode for all the reasons you mentioned. The show still has its great moments.
I think it's a mistake to characterize the details of how they were going to get the virus into the at-large Cylon population (i.e. executing the prisoners) as a deliberate attempt to raise the moral stakes. It's a natural outgrowth of things we've known about Cylons for, literally, years. Seriously, we found out about the whole "downloading when they die" thing in the first part of the miniseries, and we've known about Resurrection Ships since last year.
Given that they wanted to go ahead with the genocide plan, what else were they going to do, send the infectees back in a Raptor? They know the Cylons know about the plague and have already abandoned the infectees once.