I’m curious, then: why are you still watching the show at all?
For the same reason some investors held on to their shares of Lehman Brothers after it tumbled from over $70.00 to $2.00…
We’re hoping there’s still a chance we’ll get a good return on the investment we made during the first three seasons of this show.
But I’m not holding my breath.
She sure did. She’s terrific. Now for The Big 3 to get HER on a podcast. Wow.
I second the motion. That’s a helluva idea.
On that tip – as they say on the streets – what’s the plan for podcasts in following weeks? After the show wraps, following the live immediate-aftermath cast, will there be a couple weeks of BSG-themed shows for big-picture reflection, call show, follow-up interviews with BSG actors, etc… before the Star Trek arc starts?
I gotta say: I’ve been getting more and more nervous as this ‘season’ went on. Now there’s two hours left, and they still have to wrap up most of the big questions.
This will either succeed brilliantly or fail spectacularly.
Perhaps God muttered something like this just before the Big Bang…:rolleyes:
I just want to add that that i agree with everything that Armando is saying…
i think that the writers had the opportunity over these last 10 episodes to space out the answers if they wanted to. and excluding no exit, they didnt. i have faith that they have an incredible two hours lined up for us with an amazing story that somehow answers all the questions in a brilliant way. only time will tell, but im very hopeful.
I don’t know, I was a lot closer to giving up the show during the slower parts of season three (from “The Passage” through to “The Woman King”) than I have been this year. (“Deadlock” notwithstanding.) :rolleyes:
Seriously, right?
This will either succeed brilliantly or fail spectacularly.
Perhaps God muttered something like this just before the Big Bang…
heh heh…I’m picturing God in his little trailer doing this (cf. Eddie Izzard’s “Circle”). 
I just want to add that that i agree with everything that Armando is saying…
That’s cause I’m sing the Jedi Mind Trick ™ on you.
You will get me the cheese nachos…
Seriously, right. On Saturday mornings the first thing I go to is her column - even before GWC. DO NOT tell anybody that.
That’s not it:
sudo get me cheese nachos…
She has a good point. Anyone who grew up watching the old Doctor Who serials is not sweating this episode. I will hold judgement on part 1 after seeing part 2 and 3.
(dh was not a Who fan :()
Banaannnaaaa
I’m thinking that Roslin’s Opera house visions are just another side of Roslin’s escape from meaninglessness and Ron Moore is an existentialist.
I don’t see how that Opera house vision can mean much now as the final hours approach. They certainly can’t get Roslin, Caprica-6 and Athena back to the actual Opera house. So, maybe the Opera house is a Cylon projection they’ll share or something purely symbolic? Maybe Roslin really will see Baltar and a 6 taking Hera off just before she and Athena die? Maybe that’s all it means? A fuzzy, symbolic glimpse of the future.
Remember when Bill Adama told Roslin, in “Six of One,” about her drug induced hallucinations giving her clues to finding Earth, “You’re afraid you may not be the dying leader you thought you were. Or that your death may be as meaningless as everyone else’s.” Also recall the episode called “Faith.”
In “Faith,” Roslin was in the hospital next to another cancer patient, Emily. Emily listened to Baltar on the radio talking about life after death. Emily had some dream or visionary experience that got her believing in Baltar’s afterlife. After being told about this, Roslin has her own dream, finding Emily and herself on a boat, then, looking towards shore they see their dead friends and family (where her sisters there). I pointed out in my review that how you interpreted that episode depended on how hip you were to why people had such dreams.
There is something called “Dream Incorporation” where a sound from reality is heard in our dream and incorporated in some way. If you thought about the things Roslin must have heard as she dreamed then you had some huge clues. When she woke up, Baltar was still preaching about the river and the afterlife, so she was hearing that while dreaming. And Emily was gone when she woke and that meant Roslin must have heard of her death while asleep.
You have to wonder why the writers would include these skeptic’s clues that point to the dream as being an induced wish-fulfillment fantasy. Why do that when Roslin lives in a world where she also has had seemigly paranormal shared dreams with Caprica-6 and Athena in the Opera house? And she found Earth too.
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2009/03/battlestar-galactica-daybreak-part-1.html
You seem to be assuming that “higher powers” (eg, God) reveal their divine purposes via the mystical and/or miraculous rather than the so-called coincidental and/or mundane we mortals tend to experience during the vast majority of our day-to-day lives.
Jesus was so pissed at the Pharisees when they asked him to perform some cheap parlor-trick miracles, “signs and wonders”, as proof of his mission, as proof of his connection to God. Why didn’t he “increase their faith” by calling fire down from heaven? Why didn’t he move stones around with the force? Probably because if he had fulfilled their demands, if he had rushed to prove himself to them, he would have ended up proving that they could order him around like a slave. On the other hand, Jesus would fulfill the faithful request of a leper, a blind beggar, or a humble centurion (Roman, not cylon) because they asked with humility instead of demanded in pride for a boon from God.
Providence is the next best evidence of supernatural will - either good or ill will. When a man or woman continues to succeed in their endeavors against all odds and when the entire world seems dead set against them. Things just always seem to go right for an extended period of time… think of David, Solomon, Ghangis Khan, Attila, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, The Back Street Boys…
Coincidence is another. Waking up two minutes before your alarm was supposed to go off - only to discover you didn’t set the alarm. Thinking about an ex-girlfriend you haven’t thought about or talked with in years - and she calls you the next day. Walking home from the supermarket, seeing a poodle walking it’s owner and imagining how hilarious it might be if you were to meow at the dog… only to watch this very scene unfold in the first scene of a movie you watch two hours later, The Number 23…
The last coincidence, meowing at the poodle, happened to me three weeks ago. Never saw the movie before and can’t remember that image coming to mind before - I’ve never meowed to a dog. Weird.
Mundane is another piece of the miraculous. On Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago, a cocktail of different molecules of inanimate matter somehow “animated” themselves, licked a rock, and subdivided - passing on a primitive code of instructions to it’s clone. From wiki, “The haploid human genome occupies a total of just over 3 billion DNA base pairs…” Shakespeare didn’t write 3 billion letters during his career. Strange that unconscious, inanimate matter and mindless space/time chanced upon this symphony of a blueprint for the most sophisticated machine the Earth has ever known - the human body.
I find it mundane that scientists have no qualms utilizing words like “code”, “information”, “instructions”, “blueprint”, “purpose”, “cause”, and “reason” to describe something that’s supposed to have evolved apart from anything remotely resembling “purpose”, “cause” or “reason”.
Does a collection of inanimate molecules have to have a reason to spontaneously animate, lick another collection of molecules, subdivide, and pass on information? Does it seem at all miraculous that a few hundreds of millions years later this same purposeless jumble of incredibly complex molecules has evolved, purely by chance, into a purposeless entity that stares into the stars of the sky at night… questioning what it’s “purpose” might actually be?
In the entire solar system, no planet is remotely like another. No two heavenly bodies are alike. Even the moons have their own character, their own features, their own personality.
Penguins are birds that swim instead of fly. Flying fish. A pod of dolphins save a human floating on a log from sharks… and then let him ride them to land. Man’s taught elephants to paint with watercolors ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7Ge7Sogrk …trust me, it’s amazing).
The primitive Hebrews swore that a great being of immense power, wisdom, and knowledge descended from the sky in “a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night”, and helped them develop their own primitive system of ethics, morality, and right living…
Maybe it was the God that created the entire Universe in that cloud. Maybe it was a “Watcher” from another world who, out of interest, mercy, a sense of obligation, or for reasons we can’t possibly know, decided to cultivate a few thousand primitives into semi-civilized persons. Maybe we’re stuck on this rock called Earth until we pass out basic morality exam.
So maybe when you fall asleep in front of the TV, while listening to the radio, - or even within earshot of some students as you recline on a couch in your university library - and your dream seems to contain elements of whatever it is you’re senses are picking up, maybe think about your dream when you awake. Maybe you were supposed to be there when they were there. Maybe you’re supposed to incorporate parts of your external world into your psyche. And maybe those seemingly pointless or insignificant cues are part of a larger pattern you might become aware of… if you only tried to follow the cues, the dreams, the coincidences, the providence, and the miracle that is your life.
It’s a miracle you asked the questions you just did on this thread because it got me thinking about things I should be thinking about more often. Thanks!
When I look up and see my very own body mirrored in the constellation Orion it all seems amazingly miraculous to me. How about you?
“God is dead.”
-Nietsche
Nietsche is dead."
-God
Hehe.
I’m thinking that Roslin’s Opera house visions are just another side of Roslin’s escape from meaninglessness and Ron Moore is an existentialist.
Far be it from me to assume anything about Ron Moore’s personal beliefs, but–oh my gods, I find myself agreeing, mostly, with Norman Doering! This is truly a momentous season!
Seriously, I think you’re on to something. I don’t think the opera house visions will turn out to be necessarily momentous. Just a strange, shared moment similar to dream incorporation, as you say.
When I look up and see my very own body mirrored in the constellation Orion it all seems amazingly miraculous to me. How about you?
I don’t know about Norman, but I see three stars in the so-called “belt” and nothing else. Constellations have their shape imposed on them by us mere mortals (these stars are millions of light years apart from each other). There’s nothing miraculous there, as far as I’m concerned.
Bt this all goes back to one of my original points (at least, I think I made this point here): the “supernatural” has pretty much always been treated ambiguosly by BSG’s writers to allow for multiple interpretations. From Norman’s secular humanist position to your own more Christian cenetered interpretation to anything in between, it seems all views are allowable and correct.
Just like in the real world!
Oh, no, no, no!!
Don’t say mean things about Babylon 5 & DS9.
I for one, love them.
Thank you Lonely Toaster, wise words.