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Galactica Season 4 (Spoilers Within)

The one think that makes me doubt the theory Recoil, Alluveal and myself have subscribed to is "All Along the Watchtower". Where did that come from? At the time, the only logical conclusion for me was that they were picking up a stray transition from Earth.

Of course, this also negates BSG canon as it stands now - the one in which everything on Earth has been dead for millenia.

So I have a hard time imagining how this could end up making sense in the end. Unless the producers are trying to tell us that Bob Dylan is a universal constant or some shit. In which case, they can blow me.

Moore has stated that it wasn't "from Earth" in a sense, that Dylan transcends all planets and all space. =) People were courting that theory on other message boards until someone dug up an interview that basically said, "I just wanted to use that in a show so badly, so I picked Galactica. Bob Dylan's song is universal."
 
Let's hope that there won't be a Rick Astley song in the next episode. ;)

Can you imagine the scene:

CIC. Hoshi to Adama: Admiral, President Roslin is on the line, sir.

Adama picks up the phone and a strange voice tells him:

"You've just got Rick-Rolled ", followed by "Never Gonna Give You Up".;)

Seriously, I think they did a poor job in creating a distant human civilization, different from our own. Costumes, hairstyles, living quarters design, it's all too similar to 20th Century Earth.
 
Seriously, I think they did a poor job in creating a distant human civilization, different from our own. Costumes, hairstyles, living quarters design, it's all too similar to 20th Century Earth.

This has been bugging me to no end.

Of course, every TV show will be silly in this regard - they're aliens from a galaxy far, far away. Why are they speaking English??? Why is this kid from a galaxy far, far away called "Luke"?

Reimaged BSG really made suspension of disbelief hard, though, when reducing the single-names the characters had in the original show into callsigns, and giving everyone proper American names, with first name and last name, and both of them often belonging to present earth culture.

List of minor BSG characters


Stewart, Samuel, Noel, Barry, ...

And then you've got Bulldog, long-lost Colonial pilot reappearing on Galactica .. with the name of Daniel Novaček.

AARGH! Czechs in space!

And you've got conversations about the difference between the names "William" and "Liam", where I'm just waiting for Adama to say "Liam. It's a good name. Irish for William."
 
Of all the things to pick on with this show, you guys are reaching for the standard nitpicks internet nerds use for every mainstream sci-fi. Why are they speaking English? Why are aliens humanoid? Carl Sagan said... etc etc. The answer to all these things is always "because that makes it watchable."

If it makes you feel better, pretend they're speaking some exotic alien language and it's being "translated" for us.

Or maybe there still is some real connection between them and out Earth...
 
Hey, I'm NOT complaining about them speaking English. Like I said, stuff like that falls under suspension of disbelief.

It's when they make a civilization supposedly only having marginal connections to ours equivalent to ours to a degree where they've got Bob Dylan songs that I start thinking to myself that the writers are being a bit lazy.
 
I'm starting to think that I'm the only person who's so unfamiliar with Dylan and that song that it doesn't even slightly ping on my real-world-o-meter.
 
Of all the things to pick on with this show, you guys are reaching for the standard nitpicks internet nerds use for every mainstream sci-fi. Why are they speaking English? Why are aliens humanoid? Carl Sagan said... etc etc. The answer to all these things is always "because that makes it watchable."

If it makes you feel better, pretend they're speaking some exotic alien language and it's being "translated" for us.

Or maybe there still is some real connection between them and out Earth...

This. It's the same reason that we don't read current historical fiction that was written in Old English "just to be 100% authentic."

First and last names. Well, I'm willing to think that's ok, especially if they're either:

A. the dawn of mankind and will find the "real" Earth and populate it.
B. descendants of mankind (Earth being gone) and have taken whatever traditions/societal concepts along with them for the ride.

If you wanted to nitpick, you could start complaining about how they have a democracy, how they had a president of the 12 colonies, how they have "Colonial 1" the same as "Airforce 1," etc. etc. and so on.

The Bob Dylan thing:

Ronald D. Moore: That's actually a song I've been interested in doing something about for a long time. It's one of Bob Dylan's really interesting pieces, and I've always been fascinated by the lyric and the imagery.

More that Moore says:

I wanted to use "All Along the Watchtower" playing in a jukebox, in the background, not in the familiar Hendrix version, but just a Galactica version of "Watchtower", as a way of saying to the audience that there is a tie between this show and our reality. That, essentially— y'know, you've heard us say, over and over again throughout the series, that "all this has happened before, and all of it will happen again", and there's a sense of the cycle of time, that certain of these events are preordained, and that there's a cycle, there's truly a cycle. If you remember, in the episode "Flesh and Bone" in Season One, Leoben, the Cylon, is talking to Kara and he says that "there's a cycle of time. And maybe the next time through the cycle, I'll be the interrogator and you'll be the prisoner", and that the story is the same, but the players swap positions.

And the idea that there was a song or verse that transcended that cycle, that certain things repeated themselves— I mean why do they wear ties, why do they speak English, why are there certain phrases— there are phrases from Shakespeare sprinkled throughout the series. And there's a certain idea that all these things repeat themselves in certain ways for certain reasons, and so I wanted to use "All Along the Watchtower", something that would grab the audience to go: "Wait a minute, how the fuck could that be?! How could they possibly know what that is? Does that mean the show takes place in the distant future? Does it take place in the distant past? And what are the connections of that?" So it is a clue towards the larger explanation of what Galactica says the cosmology is, and so—

Not sure I "buy" this explanation. It feels a bit self-indulgent on part of Moore, but I was willing to suspend that disbelief in order to enjoy the series.
 
A. the dawn of mankind and will find the "real" Earth and populate it.
B. descendants of mankind (Earth being gone) and have taken whatever traditions/societal concepts along with them for the ride.

The last one would make sense. The first one not really, as they're introducing different versions of names that have come into existence in recorded history - such as "William" and "Liam". For that person, the original series' take was a lot better, where you had all the characters having names found in ancient mythology.

The main reason the names bother me, really, is that the original show didn't have those, and I saw no reason to introduce those.

If you wanted to nitpick, you could start complaining about how they have a democracy, how they had a president of the 12 colonies, how they have "Colonial 1" the same as "Airforce 1," etc. etc. and so on.
I see no problems here. Different cultures have developed similar concepts independently.

Not sure I "buy" this explanation. It feels a bit self-indulgent on part of Moore, but I was willing to suspend that disbelief in order to enjoy the series.
It's not like this kind of stuff is making me not enjoy the series. It just makes me see RDM as a bit of a wanker. :D
 
I'm starting to think that I'm the only person who's so unfamiliar with Dylan and that song that it doesn't even slightly ping on my real-world-o-meter.

I admit to being completely ignorant that it was Dylan's song (That was actually quite a surprise to find out), but, surely you can't have escaped being exposed many times to Hendrix' version?
 
I admit to being completely ignorant that it was Dylan's song (That was actually quite a surprise to find out), but, surely you can't have escaped being exposed many times to Hendrix' version?

I can't say that I had ever heard of the song, let alone heard the song itself, before encountering it on BSG. Being so unfamiliar with it made me think it was just another part of the show until I saw folks online talking about it.
 
More that Moore says:

I wanted to use "All Along the Watchtower" playing in a jukebox, in the background, not in the familiar Hendrix version, but just a Galactica version of "Watchtower", as a way of saying to the audience that there is a tie between this show and our reality. That, essentially— y'know, you've heard us say, over and over again throughout the series, that "all this has happened before, and all of it will happen again", and there's a sense of the cycle of time, that certain of these events are preordained, and that there's a cycle, there's truly a cycle. If you remember, in the episode "Flesh and Bone" in Season One, Leoben, the Cylon, is talking to Kara and he says that "there's a cycle of time. And maybe the next time through the cycle, I'll be the interrogator and you'll be the prisoner", and that the story is the same, but the players swap positions.

And the idea that there was a song or verse that transcended that cycle, that certain things repeated themselves— I mean why do they wear ties, why do they speak English, why are there certain phrases— there are phrases from Shakespeare sprinkled throughout the series. And there's a certain idea that all these things repeat themselves in certain ways for certain reasons, and so I wanted to use "All Along the Watchtower", something that would grab the audience to go: "Wait a minute, how the fuck could that be?! How could they possibly know what that is? Does that mean the show takes place in the distant future? Does it take place in the distant past? And what are the connections of that?" So it is a clue towards the larger explanation of what Galactica says the cosmology is, and so—

Not sure I "buy" this explanation. It feels a bit self-indulgent on part of Moore, but I was willing to suspend that disbelief in order to enjoy the series.

Moore does seem quite a bit self-interested. I'm hoping that he's just being particularly unskilled in explaining himself in these paragraphs, like he's trying to explain things without giving away parts of the show that hadn't been revealed at the point of his saying those things. But as it reads to me right now, all his talk about "it's cyclical" comes off as empty fluff that doesn't have any actual meaning. If it actually is a cycle, if it has "all happened before and will happen again", then it needs to be presented in a way that's more than the characters sitting around saying it's a cycle and that "all this has happened before and will happen again".
 
I can't say that I had ever heard of the song, let alone heard the song itself, before encountering it on BSG. Being so unfamiliar with it made me think it was just another part of the show until I saw folks online talking about it.

Wow. But, then, like I said I was completely ignorant of it being Dylan's song, so, I guess I shouldn't be as surprised, LOL.

Cheap Trick actually has a song that steals a piece of the lyrics too. I believe the song is Auf Wiedersein (sp?)
 
the original series' take was a lot better, where you had all the characters having names found in ancient mythology.
The "all" in that statement strikes me as a severe overgeneralization.

I've never heard of an Adama or a Starbuck or a Baltar in any classical mythology.

And there certainly is not a Boomer running around in any of those pantheons.


The main reason the names bother me, really, is that the original show didn't have those, and I saw no reason to introduce those.
Really? No reason at all?

It never occurred to you that having characters whose given names were supposedly Starbuck and Boomer (as two examples) would strike a lot of people as sounding just plain silly? Those names fit the overall tone of the original series. However, having those kinds of "Saturday morning cartoon" names in the regular cast of a series with as dark and heavy of a tone as the new BSG is just a horrible fit, and would tend to give a lot of people incorrect impressions and expectations about what the show was like.

I've always thought that switching the more cartoonish sounding names over to being pilots' call signs was a very good solution to that problem, while maintaining a continuity back to the original series.
 
The "all" in that statement strikes me as a severe overgeneralization.

I've never heard of an Adama or a Starbuck or a Baltar in any classical mythology.

And there certainly is not a Boomer running around in any of those pantheons.



Really? No reason at all?

It never occurred to you that having characters whose given names were supposedly Starbuck and Boomer (as two examples) would strike a lot of people as sounding just plain silly? Those names fit the overall tone of the original series. However, having those kinds of "Saturday morning cartoon" names in the regular cast of a series with as dark and heavy of a tone as the new BSG is just a horrible fit, and would tend to give a lot of people incorrect impressions and expectations about what the show was like.

I've always thought that switching the more cartoonish sounding names over to being pilots' call signs was a very good solution to that problem, while maintaining a continuity back to the original series.

I agree, I even recall thinking what a smart choice it was at the beginning of the series. Plus, in Boomer/Athena's case, it makes it easier to follow which Sharon/#8 you are talkling about.
 
Point taken. But I still think it was a retarded choice to give everyone names like William, Daniel and Anastasia. I hate having to think of Star Wars as an example of how to do Sci-Fi right, but there you are.
 
Point taken. But I still think it was a retarded choice to give everyone names like William, Daniel and Anastasia. I hate having to think of Star Wars as an example of how to do Sci-Fi right, but there you are.


You're OK with Luke and Ben, but not with William and Daniel? Not sure I get that one?
 
You're OK with Luke and Ben, but not with William and Daniel? Not sure I get that one?

"Ben" and "Luke" are, firstly, two names among hundreds in the Star Wars universe, and secondly, both one syllable long, and contain no diphthongs. They're among the most simple sounds the human speaking apparatus can create.

There are only so many syllables the human speaking apparatus can produce, which is why short names are quite similar in languages independent from one another, on Earth too.
 

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