Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

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Hope It Is The Grog
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Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Hope It Is The Grog » Tue Sep 20, 2016 10:33 pm

If they knew where the pulsar was located, why couldn't they just pass on the opposite side of the planet? :wtf:



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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by bishopdonmiguel » Wed Sep 21, 2016 5:14 am

Stop asking logical questions! ;)

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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Hope It Is The Grog » Wed Sep 21, 2016 7:22 am

:nah:

The whole idea of the fleet getting "herded into a safe passage" is a little hard to visualize in three-dimensional space... unless there's a huge asteroid field or something in the vicinity. (Actually, nearby asteroids would help explain why the pulsar beam always makes an explosion even when it doesn't hit a ship.) But I guess the script was written before it was known that they would have already left their galaxy, so it could have been meant as a safe passage where there were no Cylon outposts.

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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by GoldCylon » Thu Sep 22, 2016 6:34 pm

They had the invisible gun on the other side of the planet. :cylongold: :frack: :cylongold:

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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Hope It Is The Grog » Thu Sep 22, 2016 6:40 pm

Ah, of course! That's why they had to chance it with the visible one. :bsglol:

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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Hope It Is The Grog » Tue Mar 27, 2018 10:01 am

Recently rewatched this one and realized that it's my least favorite of the two-parters. (I even prefer Greetings from Earth, as weak as its second half was.)

Besides the illogic that drives the story, "The Gun on Ice Planet Zero," in spite of its great visuals, seems almost completely joyless. This comes across especially during the dogfight sequences, where the usual stock footage is run once again but the pilots never say anything. Of course the only ones we care about are down on the planet, but the total silence during the space battles makes the humans look as mechanistic as the Cylons, just going through the motions of fighting. It doesn't help matters to know that the skirmishes are just as arbitrary as they look, with Baltar repeatedly engaging and disengaging his forces just to "drive Adama crazy." With little strategic purpose and no named characters, there are no perceptible stakes in the battle.

Add to this a bunch of wordless footage of the demolition unit traipsing through the snow, and arguments between characters we've just met and so don't really care about, and you've got a ton of filler. Even Starbuck's determination to save Cadet Cree doesn't feel that compelling because Cree is such a one-off character. With a supply of colorless environments and duplicative clones, the whole story comes across as pretty bland. (Even Britt Ekland's star quality is wasted in those unisex overalls.) I find myself looking forward to the arguments between Baltar and Lucifer as the only oases of entertainment in this grim spectacle.

Anything I'm missing that makes this one better than I currently think?

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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Hope It Is The Grog » Tue Mar 27, 2018 4:11 pm

One could also ask, what is the point of Haals, Voight, and Vickers? Basically they show up in Part 1, get attacked by Wolfe, then the V brothers get injured in the shuttle crash and Haals has to watch over them in the cave, so none of them even appears in Part 2. I suppose to be generous we could assume their function in the story is to get injured, thereby providing a credible explanation for why the criminals end up outnumbering the warriors on the mission, thus Adding Tension.

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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by bishopdonmiguel » Wed Mar 28, 2018 9:27 am

And don’t forget with a stationary gun on a planet, the Fleet could have simply passed by while their position was in between the planet and the surface gun.

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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Specter » Mon Apr 02, 2018 12:36 pm

This may be giving a large benefit of a small doubt, but I wonder if the "mechanistic" quality of the fighter battles in this two-parter was somewhat intentional.

Science fiction is at its best, I believe, when it's exploring the question of what it means to be human. In "Ice Planet Zero" we have three races - the humans, the Thetas, and the Cylons. Apart from their being clones and purportedly sterile, there's no real reason to consider the "Theta-class life forms" non-human, but they seemingly accept that designation. It's a major story point when Ravashol pronounces the Thetas human, and he rediscovers his own humanity when he abandons his modus vivendi with the Cylons and joins with the Thetas and the Galacticans in a common cause.

The Viper-Raider conflicts initiated by Baltar are sort of the opposite. Baltar is just messing with Adama's mind with the calculated engaging and disengaging of the fighters. He has long been a Cylon ally, and cares nothing for either human or Cylon life: Baltar has lost his humanity and replaced it with nothing. When he gives the Cylons a suicidal attack order, he explicitly states he'd give the same order to human pilots, and Lucifer implicitly calls him out on it. So maybe the grim and wordless shadow play of Viper against Raider is a sort of "Baltar's View of the Universe."

On the other hand, maybe they just didn't want to pay any more actors to say lines.

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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Croft2014 » Tue Apr 10, 2018 6:53 am

You have to realise that BG is largely a scifi series made by folks steeped in old fashioned adventure fiction rather than scifi which is probably why writers liked Azimov and Ellison hated it so much. Ellison is on record as not liking space opera much and is very picky about what TV and films he likes; famously disliking Star Trek, Star Wars, Close Encounters, Space: 1999 et al whilst loving Doctor Who, Babylon 5 and the BG remake.

The Gun on Ice Planet Zero is a riff on The Guns of Navarone and it helps if you think of outer space as a vast ocean here when it comes to logic, which is noticeably absent. BG doesn’t really deal much with scifi concepts beyond riffing on Von Daniken (who had been widely debunked by 1978-79) and some fairly simple concepts (robots, spaceships, artificial intelligence etc). Much of it riffs on war films, espionage, westerns and other conventional adventure tropes. It grabs space opera from Star Trek (superficially) and Star Wars (explicitly) in much of it’s surface mechanics.

I loved The Gun on Ice Planet Zero on first broadcast (I was 11) but on subsequent viewings it’s dropped off in my estimation and the inclusion of stowaway Boxey is a real annoyance and very unnecessary. The logic and plotting - as has been pointed out - is seriously flawed and the science is awful ... as it is with the whole series. It’s also a tatty production being a mite less slick than other 2-parters with a series typical overuse of stock footage.

Still, as a fun scifi-fantasy TV space opera BG is one of the best. It hits it’s family audience with interesting moral and emotional dilemmas, has likeable, relatable characters and manages to have humour amongst the darker aspects. On that score it’s always much more of a go-to show for me - and pure comfort viewing - than the admittedly artistically far, far superior remake which is much more realistic, better written and not hamstrung by a TV Network and it’s daffy requirements.
Last edited by Croft2014 on Tue Aug 07, 2018 11:45 am, edited 5 times in total.

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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by johnnybear » Wed Apr 11, 2018 2:56 am

I still like Ice Planet Zero myself! It's only problem was that it was filmed before The Long Patrol which shows them leaving their galaxy and entering another one! (ours?) They reference many familiar worlds and asteroids here despite saying that no one on the fleet has any idea what to expect beyond the dust cloud! But we can watch the shows in any order we please nowadays with our DVD sets so it's not as bad a problem as it used to be! :grin:
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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Croft2014 » Sat Apr 21, 2018 4:34 am

“Leaving the galaxy” is symptomatic of the scientific illiteracy. It’s one area where classic BG could’ve been much better just by employing a scientific advisor; preferably someone who could also write. I also wish that they sorted out whether the ships flew at lightspeed or not and had a visual effect to show it.

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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Specter » Sat Apr 21, 2018 6:13 am

The apparent interchangeability of "galaxy" and "star system" was irritating too.
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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Cylon-Knight » Thu Apr 26, 2018 9:38 am

In SOSW the Galactica also flew at "flank speed" ... wouldn't that be light speed-plus.
But it seemed to just putter away, Starbuck watched it go bye bye?

I would doubt flank speed would be a sub-light measure if a ship could go light speed. :shock:
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Re: Wait a centon... (Ice Planet Zero)

Post by Specter » Thu Apr 26, 2018 12:49 pm

In Experiment in Terra, Adama and Tigh treat light speed as a Really Big Deal, something the Galactica almost never does, and they have to leave the fleet behind to do it. So flank speed must be sublight, since Adama in The Return of Starbuck orders the whole fleet to proceed at flank speed.

Yet, at the same time, you hear them putting down sublight vehicles as if they were dinosaurs. So yeah, inconsistency abounds. And if this is all sublight travel, space must be really crowded.
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