10 Most Notorious Battlestar Galactica Urban Legends
Was Caprica always meant as a spin-off? And just how many colonies are there really?
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00:00 Gods, now when it comes to Battlestar Galactica, there's enough myths going on inside the
00:04 show, mixed in with legends and half-truths, that adding anything extra to that could just
00:09 seem like overkill.
00:11 And yet it's kind of what we do as a species.
00:15 With that in mind, I'm Sean Ferrick for WhatCulture, and here are 10 Most Notorious
00:20 Battlestar Galactica Urban Legends.
00:23 Number 10.
00:24 Was Caprica always meant as a spin-off?
00:26 Caprica, a prequel set 58 years before the events of Battlestar Galactica, ran for one
00:31 season in 2010 before being cancelled due to low ratings.
00:35 It charts the creation of the first Cylons by humans, before the androids turned against
00:40 them and very nearly wiped them out.
00:41 Given the obvious connections, you could be forgiven for thinking that Caprica has never
00:45 been envisioned as anything other than a loyal spin-off.
00:48 The truth, however, is a bit more complex.
00:50 In 2006, 24 screenwriter Remy Aubuchon was already working on a film about artificial
00:56 intelligence for Universal, completely unaware of any plans for a BSG prequel series.
01:01 When the film proposal was ultimately rejected, Universal put Aubuchon in contact with BSG
01:07 showrunners Ronald D. Moore and David Icke, who had begun thinking about a wider BSG universe.
01:12 A meeting between the three men resulted in the basic outline of a show.
01:16 Had that meeting not occurred, it is possible that what became Caprica would have been a
01:20 show completely unrelated to BSG.
01:23 As it was, Caprica ended up in development hell following disagreements between the Sci-Fi
01:27 Channel and Moore before a two-hour pilot was finally greenlit in March 2008.
01:32 Number 9, just how many Battlestars are there?
01:34 It's easy to assume that, given that there are 12 colonies of Kobol, that there are only
01:38 12 of the flagship Battlestars as well, one for each colony.
01:42 This is something backed up by Encyclopedia Galactica, with the non-canonical companion
01:47 to the original series that was published in 1979.
01:49 It is also mentioned that 12 Battlestars were constructed in the beginning of the 2003 miniseries.
01:55 However, to say that there have only been 12 is not true.
02:00 In both the original and reimagined series, there was no definitive decision taken over
02:04 how many Battlestars actually exist.
02:06 Given the sheer length of the conflict with the Cylons, far more would have to be built.
02:11 In the years before and during the war with the Cylons, up to 120 Battlestars are constructed.
02:16 However, the majority are destroyed following an elaborate Cylon attack which involves remotely
02:22 disabling each ship's command navigation program, a strategy that fails to affect Galactica
02:27 given how it restricts itself to intra-ship systems only.
02:30 At least 30 Battlestars, including the Atlantia, Triton, Solaria, and the Columbia, are lost
02:36 in the first Cylon attack.
02:38 This loss is what prompts Commander Adama and the Galactica to take charge of the Colonial
02:42 fleet.
02:43 Number 8.
02:44 Is there a Battlestar named Solaria?
02:46 With so many Battlestars constructed and subsequently destroyed, exactly who and what is lost can
02:51 be difficult to keep track of.
02:52 As such, fans have started filling gaps themselves, often borrowing from the offshoots of the
02:56 original 1978 series.
02:58 The Battlestar Solaria is but one example.
03:01 A Battlestar by that name doesn't make an appearance in either the original or reimagined
03:05 series.
03:06 Rather, it is named in the 1978 novelisation of the original run's three-hour premiere,
03:12 Saga of a Star World, written by Robert Thurston and the series' creator, Glenn A. Larson.
03:18 Although the novel is not canon, the ship's existence in the wider BSG universe has been
03:23 somewhat taken for granted, despite no visual evidence to back this up.
03:28 Since then, the Solaria has become something of a myth.
03:31 Like most of the other Battlestars, Solaria makes use of Dr. Gaius Baltar's command
03:35 navigation program, all but ensuring its destruction when said program is revealed to be an underhand
03:40 Cylon tactic.
03:42 Subsequently, while not appearing in the original run at all, the 2003 miniseries names the
03:46 Solaria as one of the many Battlestars that is destroyed during the fall of the Twelve
03:51 Colonies.
03:52 Number 7.
03:53 Was the reimagined series the first TV reboot attempt?
03:56 As the reimagined series is the iteration that has gone down in history, it's easy
04:00 to think of it as the only reboot of Glenn A. Larson's original show.
04:04 However, Ronald D. Moore's acclaimed creation is, in fact, not the first attempt at reviving
04:10 Battlestar Galactica for television, nor will it be the last, as revealed in 2020.
04:14 Larson himself was talking about a continuation of the show as early as the 1980s, but it
04:18 took another ten years for the prospect to get any closer to becoming reality.
04:23 In 1998, Richard Hatch, who played Captain Apollo in the original series, tried to revive
04:28 the show himself with a sequel titled The Second Coming.
04:31 Hatch racked up at least $50,000 of debt trying to get the project off the ground,
04:36 and even released a trailer.
04:38 The project never got any further.
04:40 Larson, meanwhile, was working on his own reboot, focused on the Battlestar Pegasus.
04:44 It was set to be produced by Todd Moyer, but when Moyer's 1999 adaptation of Wing Commander
04:50 bombed at the box office, the idea was abandoned.
04:53 Pegasus would later play a key role in the reimagined series from the second season onwards.
04:58 Number 6.
04:59 The Cylons, an Allegory to Al-Qaeda.
05:02 The reimagined Battlestar Galactica is heavily influenced by 9/11, and the political climate
05:07 of the real world is felt in every corner of the show.
05:11 The tactics that the Cylons use, including the apparent hijacking of the commercial passenger
05:15 vessel the Olympic Carrier, directly reference the attacks.
05:19 It is too simple, however, to bout the idea that the Cylons and Al-Qaeda are directly
05:24 allegorical.
05:25 In a 2006 Rolling Stone interview, Ike warned against such a straightforward interpretation,
05:31 saying "they" – the Cylons – "have aspects of Al-Qaeda, and they have aspects
05:35 of the Catholic Church, and they have aspects of America."
05:38 While the Colonials have a belief system more akin to the polytheistic religion of the Roman
05:43 Empire, the Cylons' insistence on the existence of one true God is closer to Catholicism than
05:50 anything else.
05:51 Moore, meanwhile, stated, back in 2005, that there was as much a parallel to the demise
05:56 of paganism in Europe as there was to the modern War on Terror.
06:00 Battlestar Galactica is a show of such complexity and depth that straightforward comparisons,
06:05 while inviting, prove almost always to be only one part of the narrative.
06:10 The undertones of its story are pulled from a wide variety of sources.
06:14 Number 5.
06:15 Did Marvel publish a BSG comic without permission?
06:18 Marvel Super Special #8, created by Roger McKenzie and artist Ernie Colon, is a comic
06:23 tie-in of the original Battlestar Galactica, later adapted into a three-part special adapting
06:29 the TV show in its entirety.
06:31 Officially, this is the first of Marvel's adaptations of BSG.
06:34 Emphasis on "officially".
06:36 The same comic was originally published with artwork by Marvel's Bob Larkin, except Marvel
06:42 had not acquired the rights for the likeness and script from Universal.
06:45 When they found out, Universal were on the phone to Marvel, ordering them to pull the
06:49 comic until they had given their approval.
06:51 The studio subsequently gave the thumbs up, but not until after hundreds of thousands
06:55 of copies of the original had been pulped.
06:58 So far from being the first comic tie-in with BSG, Marvel Super Special #8 is instead the
07:04 first comic tie-in that Marvel actually had permission to publish.
07:08 The editor responsible, Richard Marshall, later left Marvel.
07:11 As an aside, the pilot script from which the illicit comic was adapted from originally
07:16 saw Dr. Gaius Baltar killed off.
07:18 In both the original and remastered series, Baltar survives and is given a much more prominent
07:23 role to play in the story of the colonists' survival.
07:26 #4.
07:27 Has Triad always been a card game?
07:29 Far from being a total revision, Moran Ike's Battlestar Galactica contains some throwbacks
07:33 to the original series.
07:35 One example is a card game called Triad, which uses a 55-count deck of hexagonal cards and
07:40 Pyramid, a close-quarter sport that is a sort of fusion between football, basketball and
07:46 rugby.
07:47 Starbuck and Anders bond over a game of Pyramid in Resistance, the fourth episode of season
07:50 two.
07:51 You would be forgiven for thinking that these are just direct lifts from the 1978 series,
07:56 except More accidentally swapped the two around.
07:58 So in the beginning, Pyramid was in fact the card game, and Triad was the sport.
08:04 The cards used to have pyramids on them, but in the reimagined series, these seem to have
08:08 been replaced with stars.
08:10 Such is the popularity of both games since Moran Ike's series was released that it's
08:14 easy to forget this.
08:15 Further entrenching the error as fact is the release of Triad playing cards that fans of
08:20 the show can buy.
08:21 Pyramid has been recreated by some faithful fans and rules are available online, but it's
08:26 safe to say it hasn't taken off quite in the same way as Quidditch, for example.
08:30 #3.
08:31 The Final Five are Cylons, right?
08:33 The Final Five are a collection of Cylon humanoids whose existence has been forgotten even by
08:38 most of the Cylon race.
08:40 The final season of Battlestar Galactica features the question of what a Cylon really is as
08:45 one of its key themes.
08:46 Stemming from this disconcerting and, as it turns out, unpredictable investigation is
08:51 one peculiar theory that the Final Five are not Cylons at all.
08:56 The Final Five are later identified as descendants of an ancient tribe of robot humanoids created
09:01 by humans thousands of years ago.
09:03 They seem to be either creations of the Lords of Kobol in their image or immortal skinjob
09:09 resurrections of the Lords themselves.
09:11 Either way, the Final Five needing to be created and recognised by other Cylons in order to
09:17 be Cylons is not actually true.
09:19 If this sounds complicated, it's because it is.
09:21 Moore tried to clarify things by saying "The conceptual framework in which these guys are
09:26 Cylons, it all sort of works once we laid down their individual backstories, but they
09:31 are different fundamentally."
09:32 Whether this actually helps to clear up any confusion is debatable, but it certainly puts
09:36 the rumour of the Final Five not being Cylons to bed.
09:40 Number 2.
09:41 Is Starbuck a native Caprican?
09:43 One of Battlestar Galactica's flagship characters and one who has been described as one of the
09:48 most complex female protagonists in TV history, Cara "Starbuck" Thrace is a fan favourite.
09:54 In the reimagined series, we only ever see Starbuck on Caprica, on Galactica, or in the
09:59 skies shooting down Cylons.
10:00 But her origins are never actually revealed.
10:03 Was she born and raised on Caprica, as the show would lead us to believe?
10:06 The series bible, published by Moore in 2003, reveals that Starbuck was actually born on
10:10 Picon, one of the other twelve colonies.
10:13 However, growing up as a military brat meant she spent most of her childhood moving between
10:17 the different military bases and installations.
10:19 As such, she spent very little time on Picon and isn't particularly attached to it.
10:23 It could be that Starbuck is like Baltar in considering themselves a naturalised Caprican,
10:28 having lived there for the largest part of her life.
10:30 However, while such an explanation is plausible, it's never answered beyond a shadow of a
10:34 doubt.
10:35 Of greater importance, though, is the sense of belonging and loyalty that Starbuck exercises
10:39 in the presence of her crewmates, traits that have helped to make her character legendary.
10:44 Number 1.
10:45 Was Blood and Chrome always meant as a web series?
10:48 To date, the most recent TV entry in the BSG universe, Battlestar Galactica Blood and Chrome,
10:54 focuses on Commander Adama in his youth and just after he graduated from Flight Academy.
10:59 It was first released as a ten-episode series on the now-defunct Makinima Inc.
11:04 This was not, however, the path that Blood and Chrome was always going to take.
11:08 Syfy first made the announcement in 2010 that a two-hour pilot had been greenlit for production.
11:13 A year later, their president of original programming, Mark Stern, suggested that the
11:17 show could in fact be a web series instead of giving it a more conventional TV slot.
11:22 Deadline confirmed in March 2012 that the series would be online only, despite Richard
11:27 Hatch and Jane Espenson, a writer on the reimagined series, both saying that they believed a TV
11:33 deal was still on the table.
11:34 It was not to be, and while Blood and Chrome was certainly not always envisioned as an
11:38 online release, that is ultimately how it ended up.
11:41 Still, all the episodes were later combined into a movie which was broadcast on Syfy in
11:46 February 2013.
11:47 DVD and Blu-ray releases of the series followed shortly after.
11:50 That's everything for our list.
11:52 Do you reckon we missed anything?
11:53 Let us know in the comments below.
11:54 Thank you very much again to the original author of this article, make sure you give
11:57 it a check out, and thank you very much to our wonderful editor for making this look
12:01 pretty.
12:02 Everyone remember that you can catch us over on Twitter @wopculture and you can catch myself
12:06 @SeanFerric on Twitter as well.
12:08 Make sure that you look after yourselves and you look after everyone around you.