I watched the first episode of this show last night. I've been an avid fan of the 2004 re-imagining for years and finally decided to give this a shot.
And so, despite having been at war with the Cylons for at least a thousand years, the ENTIRE colonial fleet leaves the 12 colonies completely unprotected to go meet with their mortal enemies far from home? Impossible to take this show seriously with awful writing like this.
I never liked the Pearl Harbor like premise that all the battlestars were in one places at low level alert. Larson was intent to set the show up as some type of futuristic Exodus and this was part of doing that. Maybe it was supposed to be less glaring with Baltar as an apparently still loyal diplomat to the Colonials. I have always wonder about Larson's stated vision in that maybe he felt he would receive too much criticism for paralleling Star Wars by having the humans on a more even footing with the Cylons. If it were me I would have had the fleet more dispersed but the Cylons striking a major victory in the premiere. The first season would have been the humans getting their revenge in a Battle of Midway type rematch. Cain and the Pegasus would have figured into this. In some ways this did happen as the Pegasus paralleled the USS Yorktown which as far as the Japanese knew would not participate at Midway. The second season could have been a coalition of Colonials and other powers pushing the Cylons back maybe yielding part of the Colonial territory. In the end I am a fan of the 1970's show.
shareHistory has many examples of sneak attacks beside Pearl Harbor, and some of them were a lot more successful than Pearl Harbor.
I was always amused that the first episode/tv movie of Battlestar Galactica was interrupted for news coverage of the signing of the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.
What were they thinking? "Lets get this treaty between Israel and Egypt, two old enemies who seemed like they would never make peace, off to a good start by interrupting a story about signing a peace treaty to end a thousand year war which is actually a trick by one side to attack and exterminate the other side. Nobody will ever think that will be a bad omen for the real treaty".
I can't remember how much depth was given to the war in the original series. Not having peace vs being at war may have 2 different perspectives. If I remember there were only 12 battlestars, kind of slim for a thousand year war. I don't recall any mention of planetary defenses either, though they may have existed. I was not a big fan of the new series either as the origins of the Cylons had changed. I understood Cylons created by an alien race with a directive to destroy humans. But Cylons built by humans to take their planets didn't make much sense to me since they could live on any rock.
shareThe novel gets more into things, as we find that humanity had been pulling back from the war and were more than receptive to peace. However, it kind of ignored the defensive measures around the home worlds and the size of the human forces. It does basically say that the Cylons threw everything they had at the humans. It does seem unlikely that all of the human military would be at the peace treaty rendezvous; but, that's mostly a plot device, anyway.
The novel also makes the Cylons more into an alien race than the tv series. You get the idea that they weren't quite the robotic race that the tv series gave us, though Apollo does say, in dialog, that the Cylons were once organic life; but, little of that is left. The book gives them more in the way of emotions, though they crave deliberate order, which is why they seek to eradicate the humans, who bring disorder. The Imperious leader is also the main baddie, as Baltar is executed (as in the movie version of the pilot). He leads the Cylons pursuing the fleet that forces them towards the pulsar gun of Gun on Ice Planet Zero, in the novel form, Battlestar Galactica 2: The Cylon Death Machine. However, the novels that followed had Baltar back alive and more closely adapt the tv scripts. These first two appeared to have been based on the earlier script versions.
Fortunately, Ah keep mah feathers numbered for just such an emergency!
The "Cylons" were an extinct race of being that had created these robots. I've begun watching it on Netflix (thanks to a poster on this board) and even though the Cylon race died out the Colonists still refer to the robots by that name.
**** edited to delete: "The robots killed the creators and took their name." and to add: "I've begun watching it on Netflix (thanks to a poster on this board) and even though the Cylon race died out the Colonists still refer to the robots by that name."
the awful writing is on the pretentious and stupid 2004 crapfest
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