And They Have a Plan?
Remember how the Cylons on Battlestar Galactica were supposed to be operating in accordance with some mysterious, long-running plan? Well, there’s a new direct-to-video movie chronicling its origins. The movie’s supposed to be pretty sharp, but it turns out that their grand plan wasn’t much of one:
The titular “plan” the Cylons had wasn’t the least bit complicated. The survival of Anders, Tyrol, Foster and the Tighs comes as a complete surprise to Cavil. “It’s amazing,” he confides to an injured Ellen Tigh. (And there’s no explanation of that scene in the “Razor” webisode in which Doral arranges for Lee Adama to be assigned to Galactica immediately prior to Cylon War II.) The Cylons don’t arrange for the Galactica to escape the holocaust. The Cylons don’t seem interested in tricking the colonists into leading the Cylons to Earth or anything. It turns out Cavil was merely determined to wipe out the straggler humans in the fleet. That was the whole plan.
I still love Battlestar Galactica, despite showrunner Ron Moore totally dropping the ball with the ending. But I think it’s pretty clear by now that the show’s biggest flaw was that, despite what the opening credits claimed each week, neither the Cylons nor the writers ever had a plan.
Hmm.. I can’t say I’m disappointed by this news. The plan had seemed implausible for a while now. Better to have a simple one with mistakes in execution than some crazy complex thing that falls apart in a stiff breeze.
Were I in charge of retroactively coming up with the plan, I would have gone with multiple competing plans.
— Greg Sanders · Oct 27, 03:23 PM · #
On a related note, I want the record of this website to show that I predicted the coming Lost disappointment way back at the beginning.
— Freddie · Oct 27, 03:45 PM · #
So say we all!
— Chet · Oct 27, 03:48 PM · #
Yeah. I prefer to ignore the existence of the last episode. Without that, the series is really good, and still full of interesting mystery.
“They have a plan, but it’s a really stupid plan.”
— Brian Moore · Oct 27, 04:26 PM · #
Freddie:
I’m with you. I was complaining about Lost from the beginning too (although, unfortunately, those complaints are lost in the archives of my pre-TAS one-man blog, and Ross’s responses to those complaints at the old Ross-and-Reihan TAS are gone into the ether as well). Still, although I actually haven’t seen the fifth season of Lost, and thus am a little behind, I suspect that the Lost finale will be more satisfying than the BSG finale — if only because it would be hard to come up with an ending more frustrating and off-target than the one RDM gave us.
— Peter Suderman · Oct 27, 04:30 PM · #
I don’t see how you explain an episode like 33 by saying that the Cylons’ entire goal was to kill the people on the rag-tag fleet. IIRC, there were several points in Season One where they could have done exactly that — the only plausible explanation was that they had some other goal.
— J Mann · Oct 27, 05:37 PM · #
Just out of curiosity, did you see this take on BSG’s politics?
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/how-politics-destroyed-a-great-tv-show-15245
I’ve always thought that an incoherent plot was the most plausible explanation for BSG’s decline, but the political angle is kind of interesting. My one quibble is that I enjoyed the episodes on New Caprica immensely.
— Will · Oct 27, 06:46 PM · #
The other maddening thing is that Moore came so close to threading the needle and tieing up a coherent narrative. Once he revealed the Cylons were (1) suffering from internal division and (2) being manipulated by Cavil, who had a Jones against the final five, Moore had everything in place to explain the Cylons’ inconsistent behavior. Then he explained more, and the wheels fell off.
— J Mann · Oct 28, 02:26 PM · #
I don’t really think that politics destroyed BSG. I think the early years—when the political questions were at the show’s forefront—were clearly the best. But Pegasus concluded those themes and the show moved on to exploring Cylon society and religion. Moore had a pretty firm handle on the military/political stuff, but he was on much less firm ground when it came to sociology/faith, and the propulsive storytelling of the early years gave way to the sometimes frenetic, sometimes dead story pacing of the later seasons.
In essence: Moore’s focus change ruined the show, though even until the end the show would occasionally pull out an entertaining arc or episode. The ending didn’t qualify, but the mutiny stuff was exciting (though wholly extraneous, really).
— Lev · Oct 28, 09:27 PM · #
See, Lev is right, the mutiny was exciting but that still didn’t make up for how horrible the ending was. It was bad for two reasons: first, since like minute one of the show we were promised that there was some deep already-decided message/meaning/whatever which was supposed to be very profound but it turns out there wasn’t one. That was the first problem. The second was that the way the writers decided to make up for that was by saying ‘God did it’.
— Daniel · Oct 29, 03:19 AM · #
I never watched BSG but your discussion makes it sound a little like Scientology.
— Joules · Oct 30, 12:13 AM · #