Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Late to the Party...
by Tom Bozzo
As with anything of this sort, here are a few observations/gripes that in the good ol' days of the 'Net could have been flame-war fodder:
I interrupt proceedings to bring you pure triviality! Through the miracle of Netflix, I finally got around to watching the pilot miniseries of the new (and vastly improved) Battlestar Galactica. As televised science fiction goes, it might not quite be the equal of Babylon 5, but it's pretty good. When the original was on TV, I basically wanted the Cylons to put the rag-tag fugitive fleet out of its misery.
As with anything of this sort, here are a few observations/gripes that in the good ol' days of the 'Net could have been flame-war fodder:
- So far, I like the original's over-the-top megalomaniac Baltar, played by John Colicos (q.q.v.: rooting for the Cylons), better than the womanizing weasely Baltar. I'd ask why anyone would elect the latter President of the Colonies, but then again...
- The infiltration of Baltar's military AI project by Number Six, the Cylon supermodel, bodes ill for F. Jim Sensenbrenner's "Real ID Act" doing anything beyond advancing the arrival of our new authoritarian state (yes, sun rises, sun sets). I mean, if you can invent faster-than-light space travel but can't effectively secure a super-secret military computing project, what's the chance that stricter regulation of DMVs and massive privacy intrusions will keep licenses (or at least sufficiently realistic facsimiles thereof) out of the hands of determined fake-ID seekers?
- I'm not sure why the Cylons would, seemingly, clone 12 varieties of the human-appearing Cylons ad infinitum rather than let (possibly simulated) evolution improve themselves. I'm assuming here that unlike the robotic centurions, the advanced Cylon are humanoids with an artificial genotype and, presumably, significant cybernetic enhancement a la the Borg. (I also just passed a point in Ken MacLeod's Learning the World where the intelligence-gathering phase of the first contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life is carried out using genetically engineered "bugs" based on local insectoids.) This problem, though, is at least 12 times worse in the Star Wars prequels, where it is laughable to suggest that Jango Fett could have the optimal genotype for every rank of Republic army trooper.
- Let's suppose the Cylons really want to exterminate the colonies efficiently. Aren't 50-megaton-class nuclear weapons a little weak for the job? Wouldn't you suppose that somewhere in the process of developing the technology for FTL travel, you'd come across intermediate innovations that had spectacular weaponization potential, making Babylon 5's Vorlon planet killer look like a hypertrophied pea-shooter? In this case, we're thinking about the opening to Charlie Stross's Iron Sunrise, which involves a causality-violating weapon that blows up stars.
- Of course, at this point, the Cylons' motives are unclear to say the least. Why do they even bother?
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Don't worry. Every thing except the nuclear weapons thing will be kind of explained (and no, it's not exactly "rational", but that will eventual make sense in the context of the show). Even the election of uber-creep Baltar will make sense.
Very good. I'd managed to catch part of the second season finale while on a business trip (hotel stays being my main exposure to cable TV), so I'm in the position of knowing where things are headed but not at all how they get there.
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