When I started reading Pratchett, you all came up with this handy guide for reading order.
A friend wants to start watching BSG, and my viewing has been so spotty that I can’t remember to tell him what to watch first. What is the definitive order for viewing, including any miniseries and what not?
Krista
Watch the first miniseries first — that gives you the backstory. Then, just watch the seasons in order. Watch “Razor” between Seasons 3 and 4.
And tell him to skip the episodes “Black Market” and “The Woman King”. They don’t add anything to the plot and are the two weakest episodes in the whole series.
John, you just finished season 2, right? I think you’ll like the two “Exodus” episodes at the start of season 3.
freelancer
Krista’s got it.
For the more linear it’s
Mini
S1
S2
S3
Razor
S4
(then re-watch S1 to revisit the awesomeness)
celticdragon
BSG is definitely a linear viewing experience. Start with the original mini-series and proceed to season 1 episode “33”. Go through everything in order on the DVDs and watch “Razor” between season 3 and season 4.
John Cole
I just talked to them again. They were trying to watch Caprica first, which is kind of like watching Joanie Loves Chachie to get a feeling for Happy Days.
John Cole
Now that I am three beers in, I have a serious question for everyone. Will we ever know if Mrs. Gradenko is safe?
John
Ugh… if you really want to help your friend, tell him not to watch BSG. I watched the whole series and it was so promising in the beginning but so heartbreakingly disappointing as it plodded towards the end.
Just watch Babylon 5 over and over and pretend that you never heard of something called Battlestar Galactica.
TenguPhule
One of these words does not belong, one of these words is not like the others.
JGabriel
@freelancer:
*SPOILER ALERT*
I don’t know. After watching the finale, it’s kind of hard to get re-interested in the earlier awesomeness, now that we know it leads to Hera as mitochondrial Eve mating with pre-verbal primates.
I mean, bestiality? Ewww.
*END SPOILER*
.
TenguPhule
Just remember to stop at Season 4 of B5 with the various time skip epilogues.
Faisal
1. Watch the mini-series
2. Watch seasons 2 and 3, preferably in chunks of several episodes at a time so you don’t get bored out of your skull when a writer starts writing about his divorce.
3. Watch ‘Razor’
4. Watch season 4 to the end of “Daybreak, Part 2”
5. Instead of watching the final hour (“Daybreak, Part 3”), put the DVD in the microwave on max power.
MikeJ
Wait, this is the show with Twiki the robot, right?
cleek
Ms Gradenko got eaten by Sting’s ego. her safety ceased to be a concern around the time of The Blue Turtles.
Wait, this is the show with Twiki the robot, right?</i
Mel Blanc 4E!
Notorious P.A.T.
No spoilers, please.
JGabriel
@John:
Or, better, if they haven’t watched Buffy or Firely yet, tell them to watch those first.
.
MikeJ
Dr. Theopolis is the last cylon.
JGabriel
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Sorry, but that destroys the funny. There’s just no way to properly mock the ending without spoilering the squick.
.
Porco Rosso
Pratchett?
Almost forgot, it’s the 25th of May tomorrow.
Gotta find me a lilac.
katie5
As someone who’s on the science programming committee of the World Science Fiction Convention all I’ve got to say about the final episode of BSG is WTF?? I swear we’re entering an age of anti-science in SF. I was convinced I’d start to see some angels appearing in JJ Abrams’s Star Trek. In fact, that’s why Abrams decided to reboot Star Trek, so he didn’t have to be scientifically consistent any more (okay, as close as ST ever got to science, which was pretty close).
Yup, watch B5 a few times. Don’t worry about the angel–it has a scientific justification.
TenguPhule
Were you there?
TenguPhule
Better yet, in B5 we nuke them.
John Cole
@cleek: I heard she got a gold tooth. You know she’s hard core.
Delia
@John:
I thought B5 sort of petered out and left a few story lines hanging.
As for BSG, I thought the ending was pretty satisfactory. I’d figured a couple of years before the end that if they ever got to Earth there were only about three possible scenarios. That was one.
(There, am I avoiding spoilers?)
Update: the frustrating thing about Firefly is that there weren’t ever enough episodes to really develop the story arc.
Notorious P.A.T.
Whoops, I just accidentally read one of the spoilers. Okay I exile myself from this thread.
JGabriel
*SPOILER*
I thought the angels were the least of the BSG finale problems. Am I really the only one squicked out by the implied bestiality of the BSG survivors mating with “pre-verbal (according to Baltar)” Homo primates?
*END SPOILER*
.
Ty Lookwell
re: BSG
I think the best of all worlds is to watch the 2003 mini up to the cliffhanger of the Pegasus arc, and then: stop. “Razor” is no big shakes, not great, pretty bad but not too terrible; watch it or don’t (the best parts are the flashbacks to the first war). But after episode 1 of the Pegasus arc, it’s all downhill until season 4 … aka… Sucksville, and it gets logarithmically worse until the finale. Which is – I can’t think of another word for it – an embarrassment.
MikeJ
If you want fairies and other imaginary creatures you really can’t beat Billy S. and A Mid-summer Night’s Dream. Everything else is bullshit.
FormerSwingVoter
Shorter Balloon Juice BSG Thread:
“What order should I watch BSG in?”
“Um… in order? Watching them in order would be a good start.”
“HAHAHA THEY HUMP APES AT THE END”
I’m not sure I could really get into a series knowing that it would conclude with rampant bestiality. But I guess that’s just me.
JR
B5 taught us all a very important lesson about understanding and empathy…
…namely, that Mimbari humor is based on a failure to attain spiritual enlightenment.
As true today as it was when it was written by Neil Gaiman.
M. Bouffant
Anyone remember the Congress of Wonders? A San Fran comedy outfit not unlike the Firesign Theatre.
One of their recorded skits involved the Starship “Intercourse” (Ha ha, just setting the scene.) which encounters “Space Turkeys.” The turkeys are heard in the background (from the viewscreen, I guess) saying “I am an Angel of the Lord,” but the starship crew merrily proceeds to blast them out of space anyway.
Delia
@FormerSwingVoter:
Well, they couldn’t walk around chanting “42.” That had already been taken.
Chris O.
Spoiler-ish
Ok I’m just going to throw this out there. If on Earth we had a race of pre-verbal human-like creatures we could produce offspring with, you know that the screwing and reproducing would in fact happen. 100% guarantee. Tell me I’m wrong.
Bruuuuce
Katie5 @18: John Scalzi got it exactly right while reviewing Star Trek:
JackieBinAZ
you mean men?
gwangung
Dude, they were humping toasters throughout the series, so why are you surprised?
freelancer
@Cole:
I had to google it. WTF, John? A non-creepy white man in his mid-30s should not be referencing Spykids…ever. (hopefully it’s an even deeper reference)
Tell your friends all of the above, but, even as a huge BSG fan who stuck with it, I’m not a hater; its just more satisfying to watch The Wire, or Six Feet Under on DVD from beginning to end. I recently watched the first season of True Blood, and last summer, after the pilot, I couldn’t really get into it. I kind of gave it up because I’m a skeptic and a priori dismiss entertainment that perpetuates bullshit that people tend to buy into a la Supernateral, GhostHunters, Paranormal State, UFO Stories.
That being said, True Blood is supremely entertaining and more than worth the cost of the suspension of disbelief. Good timing too, because the second season starts next month.
BDeevDad
BTW, where does Going Postal fit into the Pratchett reading list. Thoroughly enjoyed it, but I was clueless on what to read next.
EDIT: Nevermind, I’m blind and frustrated I read the last book of the whole list
BDeevDad
Damn, this sucks. I googled Terry Pratchett’s name and this comes up.
TenguPhule
Making Money is the sequel novel.
BDeevDad
@TenguPhule: Thanks, problem is, I also started with Going Postal.
TenguPhule
@BDeevDad
Well it depends on which characters you’d like to read next.
That’s the great thing about Discworld, multiple entry points
The Watch ->Guards, Guards
The Newspaper -> The Truth
DEATH -> Mort
Discworld in General ->Small Gods, Monstrous Regiment
Horrible RPG geek lampshading -> Color of Magic
Other notable characters -> Witches Abroad, Wee Free Men
JGabriel
*Still Spoilerish*
Chris O.:
No one’s saying you’re wrong, man, just that it’s a really gross way to end a TV series. So, so, much disappointment could have been avoided if the writers had just left out the word “pre-verbal”.
Yeah, yeah, it still would have been disappointing, just not quite on the same level of “Ick.”
*End Spoilerish*
Dennis-SGMM
Turn off the television and go for a walk is the viewing order.
D-Chance.
Uh-oh.
Google has a tiny, tiny Memorial Day yellow ribbon under its search box; but their “Google” logo remains unchanged.
Expect a K-Lo gripe today…
isaac
I would start with the miniseries, watch the first three seasons and then stop. The show does a heroes-like quality dive after the Final Five are revealed.
isaac
I would start with the miniseries, watch the first three seasons and then stop. The show does a heroes-like quality dive after the Final Five are revealed.
SGEW
re: BSG
Strangely enough, this exactly describes my BSG experience. About a third of the way through the second season I somehow gained some premonition; some portentous sign that the series had hit its height and was going to slide downhill from then on (I then attributed it to the fuzzy-headed mythologizing and the introduction of a few banal, uninteresting tertiary characters). I hear that my well-regarded film suckage intuition[1] was proved to be correct, again.
re: Discworld
I don’t understand why one wouldn’t just read ’em in the order he wrote ’em. They’re all excellent (except the first one (The Color of Magic): that one I would recommend skipping), and it allows the reader’s understanding of the characters and the world to grow and develop along with the author’s.
Anyway, most people who like Pratchett re-read his stuff, in no particular order save personal preference.
[1] 75-80% verified success rate in preemptive suck detection. Sometimes a particularly well edited trailer can throw me off (e.g., the new Terminator movie’s trailer is a treat (I’m a sucker for car commercials too), but I’m pretty sure the movie will suck), and every now and then my particular iconoclastic enthusiasm overcomes my skepticism (why, Johnny Mnemonic, why?).
D-Chance.
Feel the Murtha love.
polyorchnid octopunch
Well, I’d start with the movie. Then I’d watch the series. There was a Christmas special in there too, IIRC, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the story… it was more of a bagatelle to exploit the series’ popularity at the time. The part where Starbuck gives the special guest directions to the “space can” is priceless.
Douche Baggins
Thanks, all, I’m in the same situation as John’s friend and appreciate the guidance.
And now that the punchline has been disclosed, may I point you to Dan Bern’s “No Missing Link”, from the excellent (pre-BSG) “50 Eggs” album, with the delightful chorus:
“Aliens came and they fucked the monkey, they fucked the monkey…”
How else explain?
jshubbub
@ John Cole
Will we ever know if Mrs. Gradenko is safe?
I’m afraid she’s not. They were planning her as a cheating, and she had developed the nasty habit of sending dangerous notes. You could argue that it’s her own fault, really, but in the end it’s really more likely the authoritarian patriarchy’s doing.
Oh, and as to your original request for help. I generally agree that you begin with the mini-series (which is the first disc of the season one set) and proceed in order, but Razor really should be watched between season 2.0 and season 2.5. Chronologically, that’s where it belongs.
Ginger Yellow
It seems a bit pointless given the bold text quotes above, but anyway:
*******************SPOILER!!!!**************************
I don’t see that there’s necessarily any implied bestiality. There’s a lot of controversy over when humans developed “proper” language, but most estimates put it within the last 100,000 years, well after the evolution of homo sapiens.
******************SPOILER ENDS***********************
Desmond
Yes, they were anatomically modern homo sapiens. Their lack of language does not mean they were less than human.
John Cain
The BSG orders listed above leave out all the webisodes, most of which are still available on Sci-Fi’s website. The order, then, is:
Miniseries
Season 1
Season 2
“The Resistance” webisodes
Season 3
Razor
Season 4.0
“The Face of the Enemy” webisodes
Season 4.5
Ian
I also started reading Pratchett with going postal. Odd that this is common. I’d recommend the Grim Reaper sequence of books as the ones that most stuck with me.
——————————–
As for BSG, watch (in this order)
the miniseries
season 1
season 2
the incomplete season 3. (episodes 3.1-3.4)
It’s too bad that only the first four episodes of season three were ever aired. Well, that’s what happens when a show goes bankrupt (creatively and morally bankrupt in this case).
This left quite a few ends untied, but that might be for the best; many writers for TV are better at creating an air of mystery than they are at resolving mysteries.
That’s right, NEVER AIRED. DIDN’T HAPPEN.
(OK, Saul Tigh’s arc happened, and some of the trial. You could probably scavenge through the last 15 episodes and find enough good material to make five really good episodes. Don’t try)
Anyhow, at least the show went out on a high note. If the writers had remembered that this show was driven by its characters and not by the often nonsensical plot, perhaps they would have found it in themselves to finish the third season, or even write a fourth.