Atheist Ireland Forum

Trailer of the second half of series 1 of Caprica, it's coming in January, bit of a wait but it looks good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL4Xf-sDZOU

ps, I tried to use the YouTube embed thing but it wouldn't work, anyone know how to do it? it says to enter the code after v= but that doesn't work

Thanks for that – I was wondering when it would come back.

Is it better than Battlestar Gallactica?

I only caught a few episodes of that, and I was going to watch the rest until I heard all the fallout after the last episode where they tried to backwards engineer Judeo-Christian religious characters into the mix. Bleah.

So far they are had to compare because none of the episodes so far occur in space, it's unlikely the rest will either, just different planets.

I wasn't aware that they were trying to backward engineer Judeo Christian religious characters, but there was definitely a push for a Benevolent God. Also, the revelation that the half cylon half human was primordial Eve showed a clear lack of understanding on the subject of primordial Adam and Eve by the writers.

Having said that I still enjoyed the show, immensely in fact. The characters are far from perfect and their flaws make them all the more human. I have said it before that it is worth watching for the political side of it alone. My opinion is that it is just a TV show and is there to be enjoyed. A lot of people got worked up over the last episode alright, but as I said, it's just television, I mean if people want to be really pedantic about it they could argue as to why they talk and write in English.

I fully recommend you watch both, and they're easily available on torrents

Battlestar is GREAT – You will not regret watching it - So say we all.

Caprica has Eric Stoltz – I’ve a soft spot for him (from the 80’s).

Wohoo, great news Caprica is back in early October instead of the originally planned early January, details and preview here:
http://blastr.com/2010/09/syfy-brings-caprica-back.php

Caprica has been cancelled, there won't be a second series

Apparently the viewing figures dropped since the pilot, very disappointing news. The SyFy channel have put off showing the last 5 episodes of the first season until the new year.

Frak!

Sounds like Firefly all over again.

Yep, Firefly was a bloody good show and was critically acclaimed, but the viewing figures for it were always low for some reason.

As regards Caprica, to be fair, it wasn't spectacular and following on from the brilliant BSG was always going to be a tough act to follow. I think what turned some people off it was the fact that there was less of a SCI-FI feel to it as none of it was set in outer space. At times, if not most times, it felt like it was a drama series set on a parallel Earth! But I'm still going to miss it, it's a missed oppurtunity.

Having said that, the SyFy channel are still going ahead with Blood and Chrome, which is to be about a young William Adama in the first Cylon war.

Do I detect the presence of Browncoats around here?

Yes - loved firefly

Yep, proud Browncoat as well, excellent series and a very good film IMHO to finish it up, had a soft spot too for the Ship's mechanic Kaylee!

The only gripe I had with it though was since it was on the FOX channel, the religious theme was, though subtle, kind of pushed. For instance we had the presence of the Christian Shepard (Pastor) Book who often guided the captain, and the idea of aliens was never entertained, because we all know that God only created life on Earth

I'm not sure that I agree at all.

Joss Whedon is an atheist himself and although he does not push The Atheist Cause™ in any of his shows, the fact that the one religious man in Firefly is portrayed as one of the good guys isn't really to my mind an indication that religion was being given a hat-tip. The hero Mal is quite overtly an atheist (and an angry one at that) and the troubled wunderkind of the series, River, is an atheist too. Remember the episode where she tears Shepherd Book's bible up for being wrong? Also, Book's history seems to be a possibly shady and malevolent one. On more than one occasion there are hints that his turning to religion was a result of trauma from his previous career.

The no aliens in space thing was in my understanding nothing whatsoever to do with God only creating life on earth. It's one of the possibly less benign after-effects of Star Trek that there is a general assumption that Sci-Fi must mean has talking aliens in. It was a brave move to try to do Sci-Fi that broke away from this slightly unlikely idea that the galaxy is populated by other humanoid species to the entirely plausible idea that we might well be the only space-faring species out there at this particular time.

I'd love to discuss this in more detail if you'd like.

Video of Joss talking about his atheism

Wow that's a rebuttal! and I don't mean that in a mean sarcastic way, as I had no idea that Whedon was an atheist and I had forgotten/overlooked the part of Shepard's past.

I remember reading something in the Star Trek Encyclopaedia on an episode (not sure what series) where it was discovered that an ancient alien civilization seeded a load of planets, thus explaining all the humanoid species in the universe. It was merely a way of glossing over the fallacy of the Star Trek universe containing mainly humanoid species. Ironically, this in essence was introducing the idea of intelligent design, even though the original creator Roddenberry was an atheist! But I suppose they didn't have a choice, the bed had been made with the original series and nobody really questioned the whole humanoid species in the galaxy when Star Trek was first created, so it's hard to fault them on that one. To be fair they did introduce Species 8472 in Voyager, which as a far as I remember were not humanoid, but took on humanoid forms in order to communicate with Janeway and the crew, never really liked Voyager though, it tired Star Trek some bit, and Enterprise just pulled the plug on it. Still, to the best of my knowledge the franchise has never supported the idea of a benevolent god that created the universe and/or life.

Going back to Firefly, I suppose I always just get a bit paranoid with anything FOX produces, a lot of this has to do with I doing a module on Deconstruction while I was doing literature in college, I just analyse everything to the max! Look at the Simpson's (FOX again) some people say it's a bad example to children, and yes it can be if you are picky, but it is also pretty conservative when you begin to deconstruct it. That's how I analysed Firefly, preacher on board, no aliens, and the overriding factor of FOX!. I also assumed Whedon to be a believer, especially with his involvement in Buffy, where the supernatural was the central theme. Looking at it now, I was jumping to conclusions...