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Have got three free months of Paramount Plus via my car insurance, which couldn't have come a moment too soon: Battlestar Galactica has delighted me enough, I feel – can't wait to get back to DS9 and other Star Trek stuff
The Star Trek franchise will never let me down with terrible character and plot decisions like that, no sir-ree /jk^∞
Quite impressive how BSG manages to fall even more egregiously than Star Trek into the USian sci-fi trap of "It is the year 4985, and humanity is still organising itself according to the basic structures of the United States Constitution"
"It is the year 4985, and queer people still don't exist. No, not even Starbuck, how could you even *think* that?"
@considermycat Yeah, that was really hard to believe.
Overall, I found that series exasperating. They didn't just imply a planned overall narrative arc; the intro directly refers to it. Yet there wasn't one, and the showrunners eventually admitted they were winging it with no direction. They dropped hints about the supposed narrative arc and literally *forgot* until fans asked about them.
@foolishowl I saw one comment to the effect that BSG suffered from the same problem as Lost: the producers hadn't given the story much thought beyond the elevator pitch…
@considermycat A lot of the episodes of BSG are great, in themselves. That was part of the frustration. And yeah, it was noticeable at the time that Lost had a similar issue.
I thought Babylon 5 was a breakthrough, as a speculative fiction series on primetime with a planned narrative arc, that built up a loyal fanbase that didn't want to miss an episode.
But for some reason they tried to get that effect without actually planning the narrative arc.
And that's not even the hard part!
@silverwizard @foolishowl But then you do need to have the characters behave in believable ways, rather than just pushing them around to keep things exciting for Sweeps Week
@silverwizard @considermycat With BSG, the overall plot was both incoherent, and arbitrarily overrode the characters' intentions. I kept waiting for revelations of who was behind the arbitrary disasters, and no one was. They just kept throwing in disasters with the implication that someone was behind them, but no one was.
There was also some frustrating things where the showrunners, in interviews, drew equivalences that didn't seem equivalent at all.