Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

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BSG is in many ways a response to the happiness and ease of Voyager, with pretty much everyone leading a good life with plentiful resources despite being marooned far from any help. Terribly lazy writing had the Voyager crew constantly destroy shuttlecraft and fire photon torpedoes they weren't supposed to be able to replace. The ship started out with 38 torpedoes and no way to replace them (stated explicitly in dialogue!) and by the end of the show they had used something like 85 of them.

Total internal consistency isn't necessary, and can actually be harmful to a show if you take it too far. Sometimes it's better to conveniently paper over an earlier mistake. But this is just plain laziness in writing, and it hurt the show by removing a lot of material for conflict and drama.

Ronald Moore was a big driving force behind the new BSG and previously did a lot of work on various Star Treks, including a brief stint with Voyager. In many ways, BSG is "how Voyager should have been."

>The ship started out with 38 torpedoes and no way to replace them (stated explicitly in dialogue!) and by the end of the show they had used something like 85 of them.

I get where you're coming from, and they definitely would have been better served to a) not say that, or b) resolve it at some later time. That said, part of what made Voyager interesting (to me) was that they had basically taken house cats and thrown them into the wild. In Federation space there was never a need or desire to make new photon torpedoes on the fly, but in the Delta quadrant for seven years they probably figure something out.

That is kind of my point. What made Voyager interesting was the dire situation they put everybody into, but then they chickened out and often just punted on the whole question.

How you cope with conflict when your supply of weapons is inherently limited can make for interesting stories. How to find a new supply of weapons could make for interesting stories. But they couldn't be bothered to go either way, and just went straight for "the characters figured it out somehow, offscreen, and implied."

To stretch your house cat analogy way too far, it's like if the show constantly had the cats eating kibble, but without ever addressing the question of where it came from, even though that's a pretty important part of surviving in the wild and has lots of potential for good stories.

Except they never explored the problems they faced. The maquis had about 3 episodes worth of issues integrating perfectly into the crew. They had to ration things apparently, no one ever seemed to mind. Damage wasn't a problem, lots of spares I guess. Oth r than he Doctor it was 7 years of the same people (which is true for most series, except ds9).

So much wasted potential.

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