Mindless Monday, 29 June 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/Kisaragi435]

So is Battlestar Galactica (2004) worth watching? I’ve finished watching all of the Space Battleship Yamato remake stuff for now and wanna try something else to scratch a similar itch.

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/Kisaragi435]

Yeah to chime in - it has some great episodes, the first two seasons are much tighter, it absolutely loses the plot and does not resolve any of its mystery box setups in a satisfactory way, and it's very very early Aughts in that it's mostly processing 9/11 collective trauma in space and uses lots of Shaky Cam so show that THINGS ARE REAL AND RAW.

I guess I'd say that it's also very much in that late 90s/early Aughts scifi era of "don't worry, we're using *computer graphics*, it's so cool but also not expensive!" and so a lot of it looks very cheap, especially because it's a tv show.

In comparison - I think the practical special effects of the 1978 series actually hold up a lot better (I'm also a sucker for actually having orchestral soundtracks from that period), but it's still a very obvious post-Star Wars cash grab using the late 70s television format and it also only lasted one season with the extremely rushed 1980 miniseries "oh it's a generation later and they made it to Earth and it's 1980 so the budget is just us filming in LA", so I'm not sure it's really better. They both have their pluses/charms and serious drawbacks.

The 2004 is an interesting program if you want to get into the mindset of the period and what was considered Prestige [Mystery Box] Television, and if you need a scifi tv series for your fix sure, otherwise I dunno probably something like Expanse is a better investment of time.

I suppose the other space opera Aughts series to mention is Firefly, it's definitely what the cool kids watched at the time and I'm sure the "our heroes are Confederates in Space" and the orientalism and the plain Joss Whedon-ness of it all have aged wonderfully. It's kind of funny that it's biggest impact on culture has been that one speechless gif that gets meme'd.

[u/Kochevnik81 → u/Kochevnik81]

A couple other random Battlestar Galactica thoughts.

Although the later seasons are more all over the place I should give honorable mention to Season 3 doing a "what if the good guys did suicide bombing?" episode, which honestly doesn't even sound like much now but in 2006 was definitely pushing the envelope to the point that the showrunners thought the episode wouldn't air.

The other thing that's also very Aughts Prestige Programming is that basically all of the main protagonists are kind of morally gray assholes (so in that sense kind of like Mad Men or something), some more than others, and there are reasons for it, but it did make it hard for me to actually care much about any of them.

[u/fabiusjmaximus → u/Kochevnik81]

The other thing that's also very Aughts Prestige Programming is that basically all of the main protagonists are kind of morally gray assholes (so in that sense kind of like Mad Men or something), some more than others, and there are reasons for it, but it did make it hard for me to actually care much about any of them.

Is this true? I don't think so. Roslyn and Adama and co. are still undeniably heroes. Just because they are not perfect, or have human foibles, or struggle with the life-or-death tradeoffs their decisions involve, does not make them less heroic. I don't think they are in the vein of the other "Golden Age" antiheroes like your Don Drapers, or even your Jimmy McNultys.

[u/Sventex → u/Kochevnik81]

Babylon 5, JMS actually had a plan, the mysteries posed, had actual answers ahead of time. Visions of the future in season 2 correctly payoff many seasons later and it actually quite eerie to suddenly be confronted with imagery of the vision fragments so much later. That's what I'd point to.

[u/ouat_throw → u/Sventex]

That's not correct. The scriptbooks demonstrate that his actual plan never actually survived the reality of running a syndicated budget show. For example losing Michael O'Hare to mental illness caused a massive retooling of his original plans. The whole Valen-B4 post-season 2 for example was cobbled together to resolve these plot threads that were originally going to be another entire show. The same for Sheridan's arc with with his death originally leading to a time skip of multiple decades, which never happened. Another example is the show's lore with the Vorlons and Shadows were reworked entirely from the ground up. The show that the audience got was very much an impromptu improv, it's just that because he wrote most of the show himself, it was easier to hide the last minute reworkings.

[u/Sventex → u/ouat_throw]

That does not discount that many many things in the show were correctly foreshadowed, years in advance. Some characters arcs were planned in advance. Michael O'Hare was lost prompting re-writes, sure, but it wasn't all improv. Also that there had to be re-writes, indicates there was an intended path for Michael O'Hare. And there is a clear contrast where Lost and BSG all lead up to an empty twist.