I just wanted to go and start a thread about this, but I never come to this sub-board. Thanks for, like, reading my mind a month in advance.
Two cents on Babylon 5: Good story arc, crap most of everything everything else. I wouldn't really knock the CGI, though, it's what they had and they tried to do more than TNG did. Sure, it doesn't look as good as today's (Firefly), but it was pretty good and I liked what they tried.
Skip the first and last season, the rest is worth watching.
Bab 5 Spoils: I just like the naval battles and the idea of seceding and being all against this evil government. The politics, inter-species, and between humans, was awesome. They messed up Garibaldi, though, and he was the only character I really liked. My favorite moment of the show is when the centauri ship is trying to attack the narn ship that bab 5 gave sanctuary to. That was a great moment, but there weren't a whole lot of those moments.
Anyone else get the feeling that that first telepath who geribaldi had a thing for got written out and replaced by the other teep because she quit or something? And that they had that super powered planet beneath them that the writers totally forgot about until they went 'oh shit, we have to use that some more'?
/Spoils
BSG: Look, can anyone help me? Assume anything here on out will spoil it if you haven't seen it.
I watched the first episode and there was so much promise there, but it seems like they just wasted it all. I really wanted to like this cool new sci-fi show, but I found it kind of horrible. I like the idea of this make-shift fleet, but there was too-much stupid.
"Hey look, it's a cylon that's really good at getting inside your head and screwing you up! Let's send starbuck, the most neurotic, conflicted person in this fleet to go interrogate it!" WTF!?
"These cylons are exactly the same and indistinguishable from normal humans. Except, they're robots, they DIE IN THAT FUNNY CLOUD AROUND THE ARMOURY, THEIR BACKS GLOW RED HOT WHEN THEY'RE 'DOING THE NASTY', and THEY'RE FRACKING ROBOTS!" Seriously, baltar never did the robo-chick from behind, even once? Can't they just run that junk under a geiger-counter or something?
"Oh look, we need to have an election because the president is the minister of education! Let's send two of our best FIGHTER PILOTS to act as security and special ops for the debates!" What, there's no one better to guard the president? Like the secret service, or the fracking commandoes?
They can make infinitely many of the same model of simalacra, but they can't change their hair colour? Or maybe make slightly different models? Brilliant. Just brilliant. "Come on guys, it'll give the monkeys a sporting chance. And it'll be way funny to see the look on their face when..."
"Why look, I've crawled inside this smelly, living-machine of a space ship, and even though I killed it, I can pull on various bits and bobs so as to make it fly!" This really bothered me. A lot. She can just pull on it's aorta and start the heart going? I know it was a headshot and the body should be intact, and maybe I'm forgetting something, but how did she see outside?
To sum it up, I love the premise, and I really really really like sci-fi naval stuff. Which is kind of what I want help with. If anybody can say 'don't worry about all the silly junk that happened last season, this season makes sense', great, if not, does anyone know anything else that will fill my need for space-based sci-fi naval battles/tactics? There were a lot of parts of BSG that I loved, but I couldn't get past a bunch of things I didn't like. I think it would have been much better if there were more characters on the battlestar besides the command staff, starbuck, and apollo. Like, maybe some marines who could have filled in for some of the stuff they made starpollo do so that they could continue to follow these stars.
I just had the episode on where tigh's wife comes back (pressure gradient, you know how it's easy to clean when there's work you really don't want to do, it follows that it's easier to study when there's bad TV on) and the president and the commander and the colonel are all 'I thought you were a cylon, I thought she was a cylon, I thought he was a cylon", and it came across like a poorly written comedy scene, or maybe a bad job of building tension.
To counter all my negativity, I love how they command from a place that doesn't have a big view-screen of the outside space. I love the design of the ship, the ambiance inside, the fighter structure and science. Good sci-fi, in my opinion, has naval battles more like submarine warfare than like surface combat or dogfighting, at least for the capital ships. I loved the fact that there was a fighter crew, this was a full capital ship, a ship of the line, and I love the naval jargon and the various characters. I really wanted someone to use the term 'cluster fuck', but I understand that they couldn't. Cluster frack would be pretty good. There was so much this show promised, but it just kind of ended up with a lot of disappointment for me.
So now that I've ranted at the lot of you, can anyone suggest anything similar to battlestar galactica without the silly drama and contrived scenes? I want to see capital ships without a big TV screen on the bridge fighting big naval battles, and fighter wings duke it out in between. Please, tell me this exists, a place where fictitious technology and space fleets exist?
...I really hope someone bothered to read this far.
