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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 19 Comments
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I read about this prequel yesterday. I can’t help but feel that this is going to work as a diversion tactic to distract us from potential BSG Series Finale suckage. Like “Well, the Series Finale sucked…but look! Shiny prequel!! Shiny shiny!”
However, I will admit I am excited for the prequel series, mostly because I harbor a huge crush on Mr. Stoltz (Keith from Some Kind of Wonderful is one of my fantasy boyfriends).
As for the upcoming Star Trek movie, I’m so distracted by all the hot men running around that film I haven’t even given myself time to think about whether it’ll be good or not.
“But, BSG isn’t spinning off in the way that has been successful for Stargate. It’s not forming a new arm of its universe – it’s just pushing backward in its timeline.”
To be fair, BSG couldn’t have a spin-off in the same way that the Stargate franchise does. The whole concept of SG-1 and SGA is that of a massive network connecting countless civilizations across several galaxies. It’s about exploration. There are always new people/aliens to meet and new technology to discover. Galactica is limited to two relatively small civilizations that are mostly trying to kill each other off. It’s about mere survival. Unless they suddenly discover aliens, which I’m pretty sure Moore and Eick said wouldn’t happen, the only way to introduce new characters is to jump backwards in time.
Personally, I’m interested to see what they do with the new characters and situations. Thus far we’ve only seen vestiges of the colonies surviving the devastation. I’d like to see more of what life was like when humanity was flourishing in that universe.
“Enterprise maintained the spirit of Star Trek and expanded on the existing universe in a way that didn’t crush the continuity.”
Bwah?! Didn’t crush the…? Need I mention the TNG-style Klingons that didn’t exist before TNG? I mean, it was even referenced in the DS9 episode ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’! And the Borg? Holy crap, the Borg. I tried to like Enterprise. I really did. But between the theme song (Yes, I’m one of the power ballad haters. It’s Star Trek; it’s supposed to be a brassy orchestral piece.) and the fact that they threw thirty-odd years of continuity out the window in the first season, I just couldn’t. Much as I like several members of the cast, I could not get past the haphazard storytelling.
Also, you kind of contradicted yourself up there. You like Enterprise because it’s a prequel but with new characters, but you’re determined not to like Caprica, a prequel with new characters? Maybe it would help to think of it as a larger potential world. Most sci-fi shows (like Trek) the human race expanding as our population grows. The population on BSG is constantly shrinking. If we want to see it thrive and grow, we have to go back in the timeline to when it was doing that. (Or maybe forward a few centuries after they arrive at Earth and start expanding again, but that sounds kind of boring to me. It would be too much like our world.)
As for Star Trek: the college years, I’m honestly not that excited either. I’ve been pretty disappointed by Abrams’s work over the past five or six years and by Trek as a whole for about a decade now. The merging of the two doesn’t give me a lot of hope, despite the amazing cast they’ve assembled.
I think that BSG could spin off in a much more meaningful way.
Space is a pretty big place. What if Galactica wasn’t the only ship to make it out alive? We already know about Pegasus – what if there were a third ship that jumped in an opposite direction? I would think that following another group of castaways with their own problems and strengths, and NOT KNOWING how it would all end up for them might make for compelling television.
From the NATCA website:
“On any given day, more than 87,000 flights are in the skies in the United States. Only one-third are commercial carriers, like American, United or Southwest. On an average day, air traffic controllers handle 28,537 commercial flights (major and regional airlines), 27,178 general aviation flights (private planes), 24,548 air taxi flights (planes for hire), 5,260 military flights and 2,148 air cargo flights (Federal Express, UPS, etc.). At any given moment, roughly 5,000 planes are in the skies above the United States. In one year, controllers handle an average of 64 million takeoffs and landings.”
And that’s just the United States. Multiply that by an entire world, and that again by 12 colonized worlds.
I’d think that there’s a LOT more story potential going forward than there is going back.
Gotta admit, my Enterprise viewing was spotty during its run due to work schedules and lack of a VCR, so what I’ve seen, I’ve seen in out of order reruns. But, I do like what I’ve seen.
I didn’t contradict myself. I like Enterprise because, even though it’s a prequel with new characters, it’s not merely an expansion of a single storyline. It’s a new arm to the Star Trek universe. There’s room to move. Had Enterpise been the adventures of young Kirk and the gang, I probably would have thought differently. Caprica is nothing but a prologue to an already long story.
The irritating thing is that a BSG spin off could have been good if someone had been willing to ditch the Adamas and move laterally rather than backward. Like John pointed out above, there are probably lots of lost ships out there. Cargo ships, luxury liners, private space yachts, student pilots, kids on field trips, etc. I’d be interested in their experience.
My problem with Prequels is that they always harp in on things we already know. Take Star Wars, for instance: Did we really need seven and a half hours of screen time to *show* us stuff that we already knew about from three lines of dialog from episodes 3 and 5?
The Prequels shouldn’t have been about the Skywalker family at all, or if so, only tangentially. It should have been about something completely new and unexpected and exciting and original, which, by the way, had little Ani as a very minor character on the fringes of great and mighty things.
This is a problem w/ pretty much all prequels: the “I already know about this, why should I give a damn?” factor.
It didn't help that the Star Wars prequels threw 20 years of canon out the window with all the retconning, and was so riddled with plot holes within it's own trilogy as to be less stable than a house of cards. XD
I'm not excieed about the Abrahms Trek either. I would have been, if Hewlett had won the role of Bones and McGillion had snagged Scotty, but while I like Urban and Pegg, I don't like them enough to care here. And I find myself loathing the idea of "Sylar" as Spock.
I took a very long time to warm up to BSG, and it's mostly Baltar that drew me in in the first place. A lot of the time, I found it to be a big politics-driven yawn. I grew to like other characters as time went on, but without Baltar being around, I think it would be much, much harder for me — what I managed to catch of Razor wasn't any of the bits that included him, and I found it to be a complete snorefest ….
@Hoobajoobah: Right. SW is such a huge universe that any number of pertinent stories would have made good movies. The whole Ani-Vader transformation could have been told in a single flashback, like the story of Tai Lung in Kung Fu Panda.
@Wolfie: I also really disliked BSG at first and took a while to get into it. It wasn’t until after the first season had finished and I watched a BSG marathon with my dad and brother that I finally got into it.
The difference, to me, is that Stargate and its spinoff(s) are ridiculous cartoons riffing on the same tired sci-fi cliches that Star Trek drove into the ground 7 or 8 years ago. Caprica is at least attempting to try something different – a sci-fi show without time travel, lasers, weird forehead aliens, and hundreds of Vancouver planet-of-the-weeks. I was content to watch the same episode of Star Trek repeat across all of the spinoffs… when I was 12.
Caprica may not be presenting a lot of new information about the BSG mythology as the fans currently understand it, and it may not be as good a character piece as The Wire, but it’s not aiming for the lowest common denominator.
Maybe it won’t succeed, maybe their entire audience crosses over with fans of the empty, brain-dead heroics of Stargate and Enterprise.
I don’t know. I’m gonna watch Caprica.
Rob said …
The difference, to me, is that Stargate and its spinoff(s) are ridiculous cartoons riffing on the same tired sci-fi cliches that Star Trek drove into the ground 7 or 8 years ago. Caprica is at least attempting to try something different – a sci-fi show without time travel, lasers, weird forehead aliens, and hundreds of Vancouver planet-of-the-weeks
I think you just hit the nail on the ehad as to why I haven’t found BSG all that captivating! To me, a sci fi show without a lot of sci fi elements isn’t sci fi, it’s just a regular old drama. Granted, that can be good too, but to me the Cylons are more human/lively than the *humans* a lot of the time … Besides, in it;s own way, BSG isn’t exactly giving us new territory, either — in fact, the sets are kind of claustrophobic, and they retread the same arguments/storypoints over and over. Which is actuallty fine for any show to do in my book. I like watching movies I love over and over, after all. There are no new stories, only new takes, and sometimes even just a small change can produce something that makes the effort worthwhile … Hence my finding season 4 of BSG actually watchable.
Maybe it won’t succeed, maybe their entire audience crosses over with fans of the empty, brain-dead heroics of Stargate and Enterprise.
Brain dead? I suppose you haven’t been reading my column, then, if you think there’s no nuance to teh characters besides them walkig through woods, shooting at things. Or else you think *I’m* brain dead.
It’s not what tools & materials they use to tell a story that matter, it’s how they wield them. I have a lot more sympathy for McKay and Sheppard & their friends, and a lot more interest in their struggles, than I do the political infighting of BSG — we *live* the politics, I don’t need heavy doses of it in my fiction. I’d rather be exploring alien worlds …
Caprica does look like it’s trying to be something different: a sci-fi show without all that annoying, geeky sci-fi that makes women age 18-40 turn to Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives.
Caprica looks like it has loads of human drama and relationships and very little in the way of actual sci-fi, which according to David Howe, can be alienating to women. Human drama – that’s where women age 18-40 are at. (at least from the perspective of the execs).
You can read Wolfie’s latest Stargate: Atlantis column here.