Battlestar Galactica (Page 1 of 2)

Brian's right. As I work on structuring my own sci-fi epic (thread to come), I'm trying to avoid many of the problems Moore and his team ran into.

The main one being, too much of an overarching mythology that wasn't figured out beforehand.

I'm currently reading the Mistborn trilogy (Brandon Sanderson, I recommend it for fans of *hard* fantasy). It has GOBS of mythology, a backstory that's being pieced together bit by bit, but the difference is, Sanderson knew what was coming from the very beginning. Certainly, not before he ever started writing it, but before he published a single page, he knew why the world was covered in ash by day and mists by night.

I fully believe in having organic stories, in not having character arcs planned from the start, for coming up with an idea in season 4 that you had never thought of before, and inserting it. But not at the cost of a mythology you've set up. That has to stay consistant, otherwise you're going to lose the audience.

Which, by the way, the bit of Battlestar I *mainly* argue with is the revelation of the Final Five. While their retconning works for the most part, the very fact that it wasn't foreshadowed makes it not a twist, but a deus ex machina.

Remember the wise words that someone said that I'm too lazy to look up:

"All endings are deus ex machinas, the difference is that some writers go back and put in clues."

Although I really want to, I can't really disagree with anything you've said here, Brian. It's just that for me, the math works out differently. The shortcomings in the big-picture story-with-a-capital-S are, for me, outweighed by all the little awesomenesses.

There haven't been many TV shows that have engaged me as thoroughly and consistently as Galactica did. There were episodes that weren't as great, but I'd be hard pressed to think of more than a couple bad episodes. (I'm one of the few people who didn't hate "Black Market," ferinstance. But I still won't defend "The Woman King.")

If you look at the show as a single work of art, then yes, it's a bit rambly, and it doesn't have a very tightly constructed plot. But the characters were so solid that I found myself less interested from episode to episode in what happened than in how it happened. If that makes any sense.

Really, the show had balls. It had the balls to be dark and serious at a time when that really hadn't been done before. There's that story that's been told a few times, can't remember where it started; in the first regular episode, everybody is suffering from sleep deprivation. At one point, Adama's gets handed a brief telling him what's been going on. In one take, Olmos was reading it and he ad-libbed a line like "…and four suicides." It ended up getting cut because it was too dark, but that's the sandbox those guys wanted to play in. I mean hell, the first significant event in the pilot was the cold-blooded murder of an infant. That took balls, and I respect that.

Really, though, it's the whole context of the thing that charms me. A handful of not-especially-well-known-outside-the-genre TV writers pitched a show to a third-tier basic-cable network and in the process effectively redefined what serialized genre drama could be. If it wasn't flawless, okay, fine, but I have a hard time getting angry about that because of how much those guys managed to get right. It was bold and audacious and cocky as hell, and they ended up doing pretty freakin' well with it, so yay.

Finally … come on. The Adama Maneuver? Kind of the best thing ever.

I loved the premise, I still love the premise. It breaks my heart that it wasn't executed properly. It also breaks my heart that, like Lost, they couldn't construct compelling drama with actual human beings in a non-supernatural situation and instead had to resort to crazy supernaturalistics.

You're flying in a collection of floating rust buckets, towards a destination that is impossibly far away, if it exists at all, without enough food, water, or fuel to get there, all the while being chased by killer robots. That's plenty! Stop right there! I don't need ancient prophecies! I don't need supernatural beings! Give me these groups of people in these particular circumstances and I'm with you all the way!

And yes, other than the missed opportunities, the clearest indication they didn't have a plan was in the lack of foreshadowing. If you bought for a second that the Final Five were anything but the result of some darts being thrown at headshots taped to the wall, then I don't know what to tell you.

And again, I'm not saying you need to have every moment over the span of five years figured out for the pitch meeting. But if your opening titles include the words, "The Cylons have a plan," then you, as the writer, damn well better have SOME idea of what that plan is. To do otherwise is simply insulting the audience.

Hmm. I can see some truth in that. I enjoy hard-sci-fi as much as the next guy — more or less — and I dug the early episode where the military briefed the civilian government on the water shortage by explaining that space is a barren, empty place and that all they could do was search nearby stars with optical telescopes. That was cool.

But I also can understand that a show with that premise and those rules can only end one way: slow extinction. Lost between the stars with minimal resources and no hope? Either magic has to happen, or everybody dies freezing and alone.

Plus, there's this other point that I'm about to make right now…

Again, I see where you're coming from, and I can't really argue, 'cause we're talking about opinions here. But I, speaking as a member of the audience, never felt insulted. One of the things I liked about the show was the fact that the cylons weren't monolithic. They had a variety of agendas and points of view, depending on which model you were listening to at the time. The cylons had a plan, or at least one model did, but it was a complete failure, and most of the run of the show consisted of the cylons trying to find their way out of the mess they'd gotten themselves into. That was a story I hadn't seen before.

And really, that's what it all boiled down to for me. Yes, the writers made the show up as they went along. But you know what? I was always entertained. At no point did I reach my personal threshold of tolerance for stupidity, a threshold I crossed with "Lost" very early on in its run. I concede that every point you've made is valid, and based in truth, but none of that changes the fact that I enjoyed the hell out of that show, and still find it has re-watch value. Hell, the part where Starbuck winks at Tigh during the briefing in "The Hand of God" alone earns my forgiveness for a multitude of sins.

EDIT: I seem to have neglected to make my actual point. What I mean to say is this: The rules of storytelling — rules, guidelines, whatever — exist for a reason, and they're good rules. But the fact remains that sometimes it's possible for a story to work, to entertain, to captivate, despite breaking those rules. Sometimes rules are broken by geniuses who are transcending the art form, and sometimes rules are broken by dumb schmucks who don't know any better, and doesn't it just suck that either the genius or the dumb schmuck has a chance of succeeding despite his deliberate or accidental iconoclasty.

(And before anybody tries to horn in on my thing, I've totally got dibs on naming a band "The Accidental Iconoclasty.")

Last edited by Jeffery Harrell (2010-07-09 22:01:04)

I don't know if this is true or just something I assumed, but I think that was a budget choice more than anything. Make 'em look like people and you don't have to spend money on make-up, costumes or visual effects. Plus the it-could-be-anyone paranoia factor worked as well.

Except — and I may be going off the reservation here — the original cylons were fucking lame.

I don't want to hijack Brian's thread. But either here or somewhere else, I'd love to hear what those damned reasonable reasons might actually be. I've never actually encountered a story with space aliens who want to exterminate humanity that made a lick of sense. Either the aliens were just inherently genocidal maniacs — like, as an in-born character trait — or their motivations were dumb.

Not to try to defend the show here any more than I already have, but the motivation of the cylon was built in to the backstory: they were created as robot slaves, and they rebelled against their masters with such hatred that they attempted wholesale extermination. Not the most original premise in the world, but at least it's a sensible one.

If you just replace the cylon with aliens, then the "we created them" thing has to disappear, obviously. Which means we had to encounter the aliens somehow somewhere along the way and then enslave them, which isn't the sort of thing you want your protagonists to be on the hook for. Kinda erodes audience sympathy a bit.

Generally I have little patience for aliens in science fiction. There are definitely authors out there — I've got a soft spot for Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle — who can write aliens that actually make sense, and give them motivations that are nonsensical in a human context but that are really quite reasonable given the aliens' … well … alienness. But far more often, aliens are either just monsters by another name or people with funny haircuts, and personally I'd rather hear stories about monsters or people.

Screw it. Let's just hurry up and get an adaptation of "The Mote in God's Eye" made. It'll have to be twelve hours long, like "The Lord of the Rings." Shoot three or four super-epic movies all at once and release 'em every six months for two years. They'll make ten billion dollars and win every award there is.

In my beautiful, beautiful dreams.

Now, see. I haven't watched it since it originally aired, but at the time, I remember digging it. Not like "oh, that was really good," but I remember it being a noir piece, and a fairly skillfully executed one at that. It didn't fit in with the rest of the show either plot-wise (Lee had a girlfriend!?) or thematically, but I accepted it as a little amusement.

"The Woman King," though, was just bad. It had a really great premise, too. Here's a bunch of people, all of the same racial/ethnic/whatever group, who are particularly susceptible to a disease. The disease appears in the fleet, and although a treatment exists, there's nowhere near enough of it to treat everyone who's sick. If the ones who can't be treated are allowed to linger, they'll have a massive contagion on their hands that they're not equipped to handle with quarantine. What are the ethics of euthanizing the sick in order to save the rest? That's a great setup! Unfortunately they squeezed that whole aspect of it into the last five minutes, and totally blew off the interesting part in favor of some heavy-handed moralizing and some ultimately pointless character … um … what do you call "character development" that's aborted and ends up having no affect on the character? Anyway, whatever you call it, it was that.

Not to be Mister Critical Guy, but I have the exact same problem with both of those examples: They're people with funny hair. Their motivations, as you've described them, are human motivations. Why make them aliens at all?

Okay, in the first example there's energy-being stuff going on, and I respect that. Not having seen the movie I won't criticize it. But my bigger point is that aliens should be alien, otherwise they're better off being something else.

Lemme cough up some examples from books I've particularly enjoyed, so I can splain what I mean. Maybe there are excellent examples in TV or film that I'm just not thinking of right now.

I'm about to spoil some shit.

Earlier I mentioned "The Mote in God's Eye." In that novel, there's a species called the Moties ('cause they live around a star called the Mote, and humans can't pronounce their name for themselves), and their defining characteristic is that they breed uncontrollably. They're … urg. What's the word. They're like bivalves in that they change sex periodically. When female, a Motie has to become pregnant, or her hormone imbalance will kill her. So Moties can't control their population. They also don't have interstellar travel, so they're stuck in one solar system, with one planet and a handful of space settlements. Consequently, they've got a vast history of total war caused by population pressure. The Moties keep this a closely guarded secret, for obvious reasons.

Humans make first contact with the Moties, and find them both intelligent and generous. They offer to share freakin' everything with the humans in exchange for the secret of practical interstellar travel. The book is basically half travelogue (about the first embassy trip to the Mote) and half mystery (about the humans trying to figure out just what's up with the Moties). In the end, the humans figure it out — if they let the Moties out of their one solar system, they'll breed like rabbits and make devastating wars and just generally turn the galaxy into hell. They contemplate extermination, but decide instead just to blockade the Mote system … forever.

The Moties are probably my favorite aliens in all of science fiction. They're different. But not like incomprehensibly different. They're similar enough to humans that we can understand them and relate to them, but this one fact of their biology ripples out to give them a totally different society, history, outlook on life, set of values … everything. The intersection between human society and Motie society makes for a really great read.

Second example: "A Fire Upon the Deep" by a guy named Vinge. This book has more Big Ideas crammed in it per page than just about any other I've ever read. It includes a fantastic twist on the notion of applied theology. But in it there's an alien species that evolved from pack animals. They're sort of half-wolf, half-ferret. But the catch is they're only self-aware as a pack. Not like a herd or a hive mind, but a pack or litter of between three and ten individuals. On their own, they're just animals. But as a pack, they've got a mind. The individual members communicate through high-pitched vocalizations that happen below the conscious level; there are references in the book to packs being stunned into unconsciousness by noises that literally made it too loud to think.

As characters, the members of this species aren't radically different from people. Again, they're similar enough to relate to. In fact, Vinge kind of plays with that a bit, if I remember right. Some parts of the book are written from the third-person point of view of one of the alien characters, and Vinge doesn't go out of his way to explain just what these critters are. He just drops the reader into their world and lets you pick it up as you go. It's entertaining and original.

At the other end of the spectrum, there's this guy named Varley who's written several novels with the same setting — including my all-time, hands-down, never-to-be-defeated favorite novel ever period. In his books, at some point in the arbitrary future man has sort of lightly colonized the solar system. There are city-sized settlements on the moon and Mars and elsewhere, but almost everybody lives on Earth. One day vast and incomprehensible aliens appear in the sky and destroy all large-scale man-made things on the planet. Then they go away again. And we never find out why. As one of his books (or maybe book jackets) puts it, "Over the next month, two billion people starved to death."

This is pure backstory for him, not plot. His short stories and novels in that setting all take place years after the fact, with the remnants of humanity scattered among the moons and planets of the solar system. But as aliens go — and alien genocides in particular — that's a damn good one in my book. The aliens are completely incomprehensible, and they destroy our shit without ever giving any hint as to why, with all the deference — and probably all the concern — of a person treading on an anthill.

If you're gonna do aliens, have the balls to do fucking aliens, is what I'm saying here. Either make them fundamentally different from us in a way that, by itself, is sufficiently interesting to grab attention and that creates some kind of motivation for your story, or make them as different from us as we are from a hurricane and let the consequences be your story.

Anyway, that's more about my personal taste than anything, but there it is.

I smiley-face-emoticon back at you, 'cause it's Friday and we're all having fun here. But no, that's not actually what I was saying. Well. Sort of—NO. No, I was right and smart and good and I will stick to that.

If aliens think like us — if they reason and believe and feel in ways that would be more-or-less recognizable coming from our next-door neighbors — then their motivations should make sense. In human history, there've been myriad pogroms and acts of systematic aggression against the Jews, for example, the Nazi holocaust being obviously the most notorious. Trying to wipe out an entire race (for lack of a better word) of people? Crazy talk! But if you look at each of those events, there was at least some kind of rationale behind it. It didn't begin and end with "arg, we hate the Jews, let us kill all of them." It started somewhere else and ended with let-us-kill-all-of-them.

"The Chronicles of Riddick" is not, by any reasonable definition of the phrase, a good movie. (I happen to like it anyway, but that's neither here nor there.) The bad guys in that movie have this whole religion based on the idea that paradise exists on the other side of death, and your reward over there is proportional to how many souls you usher across the veil while you're here. Murder and genocide are their mitzvot.

Or take the Reavers from "Firefly." I forget the actual line of dialogue that introduced them, but it's a single line of dialogue. Something along the lines of, "They went out into the darkness and looked out and saw nothing and went insane." That's a motivation. It's a fucking scary motivation, 'cause I think there's something about it that resonates. We've all looked into an abyss at one time or another, and all felt that lingering notion that maybe we left a part of ourselves behind there. It's not that big a leap to imagine leaving all of ourselves there. (Or maybe that's just me.)

If you want me to accept omnicidal aliens, all I ask in return is that their reason for being omnicidal be understandable, or at least interesting.

On the other hand, aliens can be so different, so bizarre, so weird that nothing they ever do could be considered reasonable by our standards … but in that case, go all the way with it. I mean like "Solaris" all-the-way here. Of course, in that case the aliens are really more part of the setting than they are characters. They're akin to a force of nature, in terms of the part they play in the story.

Of course, all this high-minded nattering I'm doing goes right out the window if the other aspects of the story are sufficiently entertaining/cool/interesting/provocative/fun to outweigh what I would call storytelling shortcomings vis a vis the aliens themselves. The motivation of the aliens in "War of the Worlds" (by which I mean the 1953 George Pal film version) is dismissed with a single line of dialogue taken verbatim from the book: "Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our Earth with envious eyes." Envious eyes. Gotcha. Good enough for a start. Now as long as the rest of the story is great — and in that case it was — then I'm on board.

The original 70s cylons (hello, topic!) were not interesting, and the rest of the story that was told around them was not great.

Last edited by Jeffery Harrell (2010-07-10 00:17:47)

Yeah, I knew about the bug thing. I read the novelization (god help me) when I was a kid. I would have sworn they were reptiles, though. That's how long ago I read it.

But really, they were just mustache-twirlers. Why make them aliens at all if they're not actually going to be alien?

That kind of brings us back to what I said before, when I said I didn't want to hijack Brian's thread right before I hijacked Brian's thread. I'm not seeing it, so pitch it to me. How do you do a serialized TV story with aliens where the aliens (a) must by necessity be aliens; their precise role in the story couldn't be equivalently filled by other human beings, and (b) are interesting?

Cause I'm thinking about it here, and to be honest I'm drawing a blank.

Oh. And assume your budget is unlimited and you can hire every VFX artist on the planet. And your render farm is the size of Kentucky.