First, Don't Use Quotes
Battlestar Galactica is about humans, but not from Earth. Their world has many parallels to ours, but not the same history.
That why I was a bit confused last night when Colonel Tigh told a doctor who was killing people "what ever happened to 'do no harm'?" Is he quoting from what he believes to be in the Hippocratic Oath? Does their world have an Hippocrates?
By the way, he's speaking to a Doctor Robert. Is this an allusion to the Beatles' "Doctor Robert"?
Which reminds me of the last episode of Lost. (A fine episode.) Juliet's husband was named Edmund Burke. The show already has one character called John Locke, and another called Rousseau. They might be going overboard on this philosopher name thing.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:59 AM
6 Comments:
We've reached the last episode of Lost? THank God.
I think it was Dr. Cottle's line and I had the exact same reaction. On the DVD commentary from the BSG mini-series, Ron Moore mentions at one point how careful he is about real-world references in the script. If I remember correctly, he was annoyed that a reference to a chicken dinner slipped by. So it was jarring to see a dog on New Caprica (pets?) and now to hear the Hippocratic Oath.
But wasn't the extra scene -- where Helo admits he killed the cylons -- more jolting?
Without or without the extra scene, I thought the episode was a time-filler tht existed mostly to give Helo a shot at being heroic.
BSG has long since lost their "different world" credibility.
Their boxing matches use rules that are incredibly similar to ours, even though ours were developed by the British in the 19th century.
Their political system has relative powers of the president and the representatives clearly based on the American model, or maybe the French.
Their bureaucracy is just like ours, but to make it look "exotic" they cut the corners off their paper.
For me, the low point of ST:TNG was when, to prove to the audience that Ensign Ro of Bajor was "foreign", they stressed that on her planet the family name is the first name, not the last. To emphasize how alien this was, Riker found it startling and hard to adjust to. Meanwhile, to stress how alien the Klingons were, they have a tea ceremony.
When someone says "I am a ballet dancer, but I don't feel constrained by all the artificial rules and conventions that regular ballet dancers use", that means "I'm a lousy ballet dancer." And I suspect that television executives know that fact. Hopefully, someday, television executives will also know what it means when someone like Ron Moore says "I will make a science fiction show that doesn't fall into the conventions of science fiction." Sorry, but those conventions are not random.... the idea that aliens don't speak English isn't just some silly idea.
I can handle the concept (even if it is silly) of parallel development, and on BSG, we can believe these are our ancestors or descendants, but specific historical figures and specific quotes go too far.
As for Star Trek show, I can accept, for financial reasons, that everyone speaks English and is humanoid. The one problem is other planets and races seem to feature only one or at most two cultures. (Then again, all Federation types are pretty much alike.)
In ST:TOS, not only did almost all aliens speak English and look human, but they were all Caucasian.
ST:TNG realized this had to change. So, early in their first season, they visited a planet where everyone was human and black. BUT in this episode, the plot was about the fact that the people on this planet were savages who fought with crude weapons.
Given how politically correct ST:TNG usually was, it was astounding that no one at the show vetoed this combination of plot and race!
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