Brad Ideas - Daybreak, Part One - Comments

You can have hard and soft

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:31:09 -0700

You can have hard and soft sci-fi and, I suppose, hard and soft religion. I'm with Brad in thinking that BSG aimed high and ended up making a slew of mistakes as its ploughed itself into the ground. As that's become more obvious, I note, some people are going fanboi over this. Circumspect views and not liking what's unfolding are dismissed as mere rubbish while their wild speculation and holy huddle is promoted as the one true carrier of the word. If that's what's happening I'm rather glad there's only one show left.

Baltar will be taking over

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:16:08 -0700

Baltar will be taking over fleet before the assault on the colony and swooping in to save the day. Thus redeeming himself.

Baltar

Lisa — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 06:35:17 -0700

Maybe that's when Baltar steps up as the new leader.

so what happens after the suicide mission?

bad dog — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:36:21 -0700

One thing I am curious about. Apparently, Adama already offered a general pardon to the mutineers, and those in the brig are hardcore against him, but he just let them out so they could make a choice, too. So he says we’re going on a suicide mission to save a spooky half-Cylon kid and fulfill our destiny by taking on a ship the size of a planet floating at the edge of a black hole–NOW WHO’S WITH ME, PEOPLE?!? About a third say yes even though Adama’s speech was hardly compelling and he's hardly still the leader he used to be. I’m just wondering what happens if his suicide mission ends with suicide. The whole government’s gone (Lee, Adama, Roslin). All of the Adama loyalists will be dead, and the F5 too, the only thing holding the fleet to the Cylons. The fleet’s sole protection is gone. So all that will be left will be a bunch of Cylon haters on board the CYLON BASESHIP, with no government, nobody in unified command of the military and all the rational people in favor of alliance dead. And the Cylons have the big guns right in the middle of the human fleet and no reason not to finish the job.

THAT will be fun…

Bullsh--

Alvin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:34:02 -0700

"This is bullshit to be honest."

Let's wait and see what it is before we go and trash it, shall we? You yourself said it 'seems' to be, which doesn't mean it is. It might not be a plot device for the ending, but simply a way to make the assault more difficult. Not anything can happen with a black hole, by the way. Most of what you describe is simply conjecture going on in internet chatter such as this blog. We've seen the singularity for all of a second or two and people are just making guesses as to what it means. While it's fun to speculate what may be, don't get all worked up over it if you don't like our speculation. We're probably wrong, anyway.

the end and naked singularities

alan — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:52:52 -0700

I have loved this and hated it at the same time.
In season 4 i have mainly become frustrated with it. I'm with Brad and hard SF. Any other SF is lame to me, especially if dosed with a sugar coating of religion. I have become bored with religion in this show. they appear to be suddenly evoking the naked singularity where anything can supposedly happen including God the devil, evil and good and redemption etc etc. This is bullshit to be honest. Its called painting yourself into a corner and evoking a weak plot device you have never referred to before to get out of it in a ludicrous way. Shit, shit , shit It could have been oh so much better than this.

so it goes i suppose.

repair

Aaron — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:51:36 -0700

now it makes internally consistent sense.

That 10 min. session

Aaron — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:30:38 -0700

BSG science advisor Dr. Kevin Grazier describes having such a meeting on the subject of star patterns, with the writers at least, in this video. He describes his role not as the guy who lobbies for accurate science in the show, but as a willing purveyor of knowledge if, and only if, the writers want to use science to constrain the drama. As an example of this in practice, he describes a presentation he gave to the writers about how constellations and other stellar phenomena would best be used as a map to earth from somewhere else in the galaxy (whole video is interesting, relevant section at about 5:00)

The issue of astronomical perspective has dogged many fans throughout the show, and it was surprising to me at least, that the writers were, at some time, apprised of the relative sense and nonsense of using familiar our-earth constellations. That the show has continued to use them in ways that don't make internally consistent sense is certainly frustrating given their resources. My own guess is that somewhere (season 3?) there is an episode(s) that uses constellations in a way that makes sense and fits the story, but that in general there was no prohibition on using any old starmaps during ordinary 'from space' shots. So, the post-production side may have followed explicit starmap guidelines in the script when they were given, but neglected to realize that those shots' significance would be nullified by an overall anything goes approach.

Biggest ever

brad — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:38:29 -0700

Actually, it may not be the biggest thing ever. We don’t think about it in this way, but cities are “things built by man.” You don’t think of them as one artifact, as they are built over time, and the connection between the parts is just pavement, but a city is an artificial “object” that covers many hundreds of square miles.

Once you have no limitations on getting into space, and are not worried about vacuum for your workers, constructing something as big as a city in weightless space is pretty easy, especially with lots of robot workers and organic growing tech.

So I envision it as:

During the war, the Cylons obviously have a manufacturing base of sorts
The Final Five arrive during the war in their ship, offering technology
The Centurions bring in the manufacturing base and build a giant facility around the ship

There is a contradiction above. Cavil said that the other Cylons would not know about the Colony. He wiped their brains of it. This requires it was all built before the F5 were killed. And it also requires that it is not Cylonia, since where do the bio Cylons think their home base is, if they don’t know about the Colony?

As for star patterns: It’s true that only the more geeky will look at the star patterns, though a fair number will spot Orion or the Big Dipper in a freeze frame. So no, you can’t demand they be accurate. And they obviously aren’t.

The complaint I have is that it’s really not that hard to get them right. A 10 minute session with your science advisor would set you square on what to do. When to use random stars, when to use Earth stars, how to generate stars from somewhere near Earth (if you ever want to do that), what geometry to give to planets and moons etc. It’s really simple, and quite easy for any graphics geek to understand and get right. To not get it right doesn’t ruin the show (except for those who notice the bad patterns and wonder if they mean something) but it’s just sloppy, and there is no reason for it to be sloppy. TV shows make mistakes like this all the time. The better the production team, the fewer the mistakes are, though.

RDM on the colony

Aaron — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:52:55 -0700

from the 'Islanded' podcast:

"...an idea that's kind of buried in the show, that I think we might of mentioned, possibly in 'No exit'...is that at the heart of the colony...there is the original ship...the original earth ship, by which the final 5 actually came from earth and traveled the distance to actually find the 12 colonies...a long time ago...and that around it, this colony had sort of been built."

ok, cool. I think the idea of the colony being somehow very ancient, a part of the 'this has happened before, it will happen again' style of the show has been bandied about on these boards. Well, I guess its origin is a bit more ordinary than that. The size is beyond imaginable--the width of an arm could easily be about 100 km (!) based on the tiny baseship. It is by far the biggest 'made' structure in the BSG universe. There is nothing to suggest the 12 colonies were able to do anything close to this, even 40 yrs previous with slave cylons.

Questions though:
Apparently, Cavil killed the F5 all at the same time, and Tigh has been in the colonial fleet for 30-40 yrs (I'm sure someone knows the exact number :). So far, Ellen is the only resurrected F5, so she is the only one who has memories of what the colony is. Since she has signed up for Adama's '1-way-trip', she will see the colony again on this Friday.

Boy, do I hope she says "Gods, they've expanded it!" or is in some way surprised by its size. If not, that means the F5 and the cylons built the whole unimaginable bulk in a ridiculously short time. If someone is able to estimate the colony's size (even for a conservative number of 'arms'), and can find the time between the end of the 1st cylon war and the appearance of Tigh in the fleet, then we can have a back of the envelope estimate of the rate of colony growth during construction to its finished state.

Also on the podcast, RDM equates the colony with a hypothetical entity the writers always called 'Cylonia', to signify the cylon 'homeworld'. The writers apparently decided to leave that concept to the viewer's imagination, until the reveal of the Colony in 'No Exit'. So if the colony is the homeworld, and if it was built around the F5 ship, and if the F5s arrival coincided with the end of the 1st cylon war...where the hell did those Cylons fighting the 1st war build their base ships, create hybrids, etc??

I am convinced that RDM sincerely wants this show animated by 'naturalistic sci-fi'. Given Michael Hall's analyses, I think it's fair to say that nsf has limits, and beyond those limits lie things like star patterns. Based on episode content though, I would argue that things like the economy of fleet consummables (fuel, water, food), the physical stress of combat and travel on a vessel(e.g., the decay of the BSG--rewatch the miniseries to see how gleaming and unscarred it is before the fall!) are well within nsf's limits. The construction of real, physical structures seem also within nsf's limits, and I hope that in some throwaway comment at least, the size of the colony is addressed.

one final pocast bonus: RDM admits that he went overboard with 'distraught/drunk adama smashing shit' scenes during the second half of season four.

You're kidding, I hope.

brad — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:12:46 -0700

Firefly is a great show. I love Whedon, big fan of Buffy, Angel etc. Those are fantasy of course. Firefly has rather poor science as well. Like almost all TV SF, it has no concept of planetary geometry. It has “hundreds of worlds” around a single star, all warm and sunny. It has people running into one another on trips through interplanetary space, which doesn’t happen. It has planets hidden behind giant nebulae inside a solar system and the only way through involves going short distances from other packed ships full of reavers.

It’s a fun show, good drama, good characters, and a number of good SF elements, but it’s not a show you would want to hold to a high standard of SF accuracy. So I don’t.

Firefly may be an example of my last case above. They wanted to recapture themes from old westerns. They may well have known it was silly but did it because they had a story they wanted to tell.

Now you may have suggested it because it has no FTL. But I don’t think it has no FTL because of a desire to be true to physics. I think it has no FTL because FTL can be a plot destroyer. With FTL you can go across a planetary system in moments, and that would wreck most of their plots.

I have said it before, but I

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:59:47 -0700

I have said it before, but I will say it again, I really think the show for you is Firefly. Based on everything you have said you wanted BSG to be, that is Firefly. Spend the $25 for the box set. $35 if you want the Blu-ray.

Science fitting the script

brad — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 12:09:35 -0700

I don’t mind this role for a science advisor. Though there should also be times where the science advisor says “you can’t make science fit that script” and the writer then:

Tries to rework the script
Decides it would be too much work to undo, but resolves to ask the science advisor earlier next time, or
Decides (and probably knew in advance) that a dramatic goal is more important

While some readers here think I refuse to accept any scientific mistakes in a show, that’s not true. That’s an ideal. What bothers me the most are scientific mistakes which could easily have been fixed.

Today we live in an e-mail world. If a show is paying a science advisor — and this is such a small part of the budget of a TV show — it’s really easy to E-mail and get answers well before vast efforts are put into a story that can’t be made to work.

The big stuff should definitely be scoped in advance.

Voodoo Science

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:13:16 -0700

The naturalistic science fiction pitch was made and milked for all it was worth. Now, some science adviser isn't there to check its credibility but make it fit? That sounds a bit close to the financial packages people bought and sold on voodoo economics that, well, just went pop.

I avoided BSG until into series 2 because of leftover perceptions of the original series. Someone made a convincing pitch to me so I played a marathon catch-up. Back then I'd recommend that everyone give it a shot. Today? I'd be too embarassed to mention it. That's not me selling anything. That's me not buying it.

How many time has this come up now?

Greg — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:35:18 -0700

This very discussion about people evolving differently has come up at least 100x on this board and it is about time the hard science folks come to the realization that this isn't hard sci-fi. It isn't. It was never intended that way. It never will be that way. Just watch the interview, I think done by BSGCast with the science adviser for the show, who specifically says his job is to find a way to make the science fit the script. Not the other way around. If the writers set out to give people hard sci-fi that is fine, but they never did, so stop trying to argue based on scientific rationale. Especially when it comes to naked singularities and the like where you could put 500 scientists in a room and they would argue about how it all works.

Daybreak, Part One

brad — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 23:26:14 -0700

I must admit I am a sucker for flashback scenes like these. Seeing the characters who have been beaten down back in the civilized part of their lives, and a glimpse of the world that was. Though I have to feel that with so much to be resolved, these scenes could have been put in some slightly earlier episodes to paint the picture. All these flashback characters — the regulars except Eight, plus Sam — are about to reach dramatic fates, including death next week, and we’re being given some things to help understand their character. We’ve seen shots of flashback scenes for Saul and Ellen and more of Bill.

The Flashback of Baltar and Six has two meanings. We see Baltar as we expect him, though still caring for and resenting his father. And we seem to see Six being genuinely nice. But we forget, because it has been so long, that Six is doing this only to get into Baltar’s life. Her plan, back then, is to betray and kill Baltar Sr., Gaius, and everybody else we see in these scenes. So what have we learned about her?

The question of the Colony was resolved, not as I had predicted. For those interested in some newer screen caps and updates, these can be found in the Colony Geometry thread. It’s a giant space station, even bigger than we thought (even when we thought it was big.) Check out the screen capture to observe 3 tiny base ships in the image. One commenter suggests that it is no coincidence it is around a singularity. This is something which has the power to destroy it, in theory. That’s harder than it looks. First of all, naked singularities are now not believed to exist. But in any event, a singularity offers a giant gravity well. It actually requires quite a bit of effort to take something in high orbit and move it to lower orbit. You have to dump a lot of energy. If you are coming in from outside, you could fall right into the well, but once you are in orbit you have a lot of angular momentum.

I still like the virus plan, though we may not get it. I do expect there to be several fronts of attack, and I expect Cavil to be able to counter all but one of them, the one that finally gets him. They need to do many things — rescue Hera, defeat Cavil, liberate the Simons and Dorals from Cavil’s lies, and militarily attack the Colony and its supply of base ships. (I have to wonder, shouldn’t Simon and Doral be saying, “how the hell did we forget building this place?” Maybe Cavil has let them partly in on things.)

A flashback for Sam was surprising. After all, he’s not exactly at the level of the other characters, though of course he has become a plot device. This supports the idea that he will use his new control of Galactica to strike the military blow, using it. He will be the perfect weapon. Can we doubt that we will see him make the perfect shot, perhaps even the perfect catch?

I have no read on the symbolism of Lee and the bird. Any thoughts? This has to be symbolic. Lee’s roof is even the first shot of the episode on Caprica, though we don’t know it then.

Roslin’s fountain scene, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, was well known to fans since students there took photos of it. Some had hoped it was a scene from their future home, but she’s not getting there. I do suspect she may get to look at it from space, Moses-like. It is curious that Roslin saw her mother in Faith while the defining tragedy in her life is about her father and sisters.

But with all that, surprisingly little on our mysteries, including the famous opera house. Kara’s work on the tune suggests it might well contain coordinates for the new home.

The Colony is certainly nowhere near real Earth. There’s no black hole very near us, let alone a naked singularity.

And I was really expecting Baltar to join the volunteers. Perhaps that would be too pat. But he needs to do something for his redemption soon. The string-puller, who gave the Colony coordinates to Sam to give to Adama, has big plans for Baltar still, and also wants the battle to happen.