I'll take boring and traditional if it looks real

Reaction Control Thrusters!!! How cool was that??

It looked waaay too much like now-here-on-Earth to me. This isn't another human culture, it's our North American culture transplanted seven hundred lightyears away, or whatever.

The bit that really bothered me was when wassername, Mary McDonald, was meeting with the doctor, and the lamp and the chair were right out of any doctor's office in middle America. It threw me right out of the moment.

The acting was fine, the dialogue inoffensive, but the editing and pacing seemed very odd to me. It was ponderously slow and pretentious, and then all of a sudden there were nuclear bombs falling and the government had been vaporized. The hell?

The characters? Eh. Fairly predictable all around: from six seconds in I could tell Apollo had Daddy Issues, without his even saying a word. I did like that they spaced the maintenance guys, and the crew chief's reaction. That was impressive, and believable.

But the colors are grim and dark and grey, I don't find the cinematography or production design interesting, and I already know where the story's going. t yawn

The opinions coming in so far seem to be about 50/50, and kind of falling on "like it, but not overly enthusiastic,*" or "not liking it, but not spewing bile at it," camps.

(*My excitement over the ships using RCTs notwithstanding)

It looked waaay too much like now-here-on-Earth to me. This isn't another human culture, it's our North American culture transplanted seven hundred lightyears away, or whatever.

That's what I meant. The fighter spaceplanes looked like Starfuries, or like X-Wing fighters. I'd seen it all before in other series, and those series had never particularly convinced me of their realness, and BG seemed to be presuming on context to make me believe in realness rather than establishing it themselves. Like, they didn't even attempt to go back to the problem, What would life in space be like? They just copied everybody else's answer and decided that would be good enough.

I thought the plotting and characterization were thin and, on occasion, exceedingly lame, but it was the lack of deep thought on the part of the world-design that turned me off first.

but it was the lack of deep thought on the part of the world-design that turned me off first.

See, I thought they put quite a bit of thought into the world design. At least, it seemed that way to me. Little bits gave me that impression, like the thrusters, the sort of mish-mash of technilogical levels that you might find in such a large vessel in space, things like that.

And I didn't particularly mind that there was nothing (aside from a space armada with giant ships in it) about the world that seemed too terribly advanced technologically, at least compared to us. I thought it kind of new and interesting. I get kind of tired sometimes of all the various ways in which shows will try to do highly advanced tech, I think. Those all start to look the same to me after a while, but the tack BG took seemed different.

They just copied everybody else's answer and decided that would be good enough.

Yes, this. I'm rather disappointed, really. Not that I expected it to be brilliant, but Ronald Moore isn't stupid, and he spent a lot of energy going on about how the show would set a new standard for space-based show, about how it would re-imagine the entire concept, etc etc.

t yawn

Reminds me more than a little of David Kemper swearing with a straight face that the final 11 episodes of Farscape Season 4 were the best episodes they'd ever done. Argh. I love that show, but he was so very wrong.

Huh. Totally disagreeing with you two on this one.

And I didn't particularly mind that there was nothing (aside from a space armada with giant ships in it) about the world that seemed too terribly advanced technologically,

Well, I think that they explained that away fairly well. It didn't bother me. What bothered me is that everything looked the same as it does here, now. Even if the technology level is the same, things look different in other cultures, other places. Different histories, different materials, different minds.

But no, it all looked exactly the same as it did in S:AAB or Bab5 or Enterprise. Dull.

But no, it all looked exactly the same as it did in S:AAB or Bab5 or Enterprise.

Huh. I can see just a little bit of similarity to S:AAB, but I thought it all looked very different from Bab5 or Enterprise.

And I didn't particularly mind that there was nothing (aside from a space armada with giant ships in it) about the world that seemed too terribly advanced technologically, at least compared to us.

It's not a lack of high-tech that annoyed me; it's a lack of different. It was like they set up shop on the Generic Sci Fi Channel Space Ship Set, and then dressed it a little bit (with phone cords).

Space television will insist on using sheetrock for internal walls in a space ship. (They didn't even pretend it was steel.) And they always insist on individual fighters swarming around a large carrier, and those fighters are always shaped like needles with stabilizing wings at the back, and they're always flown by cigar-chomping hotshots.

It was just a resounding lack of creative sideways-thinking in the design. I'd seen it all before. We'll not start in with what I'd seen before in the plotting and the dialogue.