I very much like this angle, but yes.
To me the key is that they really needed another season, ideally two. At a minimum there should have been some time to settle into some kind of "new normal" with the two Battlestars prior to New Caprica with a longer election cycle more separate from the Adama/Cain issue. The back half of this alternate season could then focus on settling New Caprica, with at least some indication of the time gap there was supposed to be between settling and invasion. If the resistance and escape could then be dragged out to a half season the "second exodus" period would have more time to stretch things out and put the Cylon Civil War in better context. Put Baltar's trial between the new season 4 finale and 5 debut and you have a full season to work out the final five, tie up a lot of those threads that got dropped and ultimately do something more sensible with the ending.
OTOH the writers strike definitely bit the production, but Moore always said it was a four year project... I'm inclined think that there were real hiccups in the production at the end given how well the first two seasons went, and how much things fell apart after the strike.
FOR ALL THAT...
I think something closer to the original series landing on modern Earth fits the whole setting and structure better, however you want to justify it in lore terms. I suspect that Moore and company being adamant about not getting into a Battlestar 1980 situation is what REALLY killed serious consideration of that.
Were I writing the whole thing there are a few angles I could see going down, but I am inclined to consider a few concepts as preferential to what they did
- Dropping the ancients angle and making our Earth the destroyed one rather than the 13th tribes planet
- Introducing a 14th tribe in some way shape or form
- Discovering a modern society to end the series, but as that 14th tribe rather than our actual real world, which frankly makes going forward in a serious vein AFTER that discovery damn near impossible to write
- Finding ancient remains of a Battlestar/Basestar and/or quite possibly Galactica herself on the final planet and a tribal society
- I like that this can absolutely be left ambiguous in terms of things like "is this time travel, this happening before, divine fuckery, etc" and "are those tribes survivors or parallel evolution" and "why do they have Cylon genetics"
- Writing this out, it strikes me that the proper ship to find is probably Pegasus. While Galactica could be made to work alongside Kara's whole death/rebirth thing I see a very real chance to leave some real ambiguity about the ultimate end of Pegasus
- It could also be a wholly other ship, especially if (as they should imo) there are hints dropped throughout the series that other Colonial Fleet units ARE out there somewhere
Suffice to say that my hope is that the new revival sticks to its guns about not being a reboot but avoids the 2000s series as well. My hope would be for a show that keeps the politics and looks at an attempt to salvage something from the ashes of the colonies, everything about the resistance screaming that at LEAST Caprica and quite possibly other colonies are absolutely teeming with survivors before the occupation begins. It's very easy to imagine another Battlestar and someone further down the succession list than Rosalyn returning at some point after New Caprica.
After watching the BSG pilot, I was stunned. I was expecting to see a cheesy reboot of a cheesy 70s Star Wars rip off and it turned out to be a chilling parallel to 9/11. Even the nukes detonating in the distance from Baltar’s house struck a nerve, reminding me of terrors I experienced as a kid during the Cold War. Star Wars zap zap blasters were nowhere to be seen.
There was always so much about BSG that I loved but I found that it eventually disappeared up its own mythology. As with many of these shows, the magic was lost when that happened. Watching the pilot made me think that the writers just couldn’t stick to the usual Chariots of the Gods stuff. It needed to be believable. There were a few things I wished they’d changed from day one.
Some thoughts:
a. BSG is made by HBO and not SyFy. So we get proper financial commitment, no big rush to the end of season 4 and a racier script.
b. Higher budget means more use of CGI mechanical Cylons. Which butterflies away the ludicrous sight of Tricia Helfer doubles in blonde wigs doing heavy labour aboard the Galactica or elsewhere.
c. No return to Caprica. Helo is dead. Leave him there. Or leave someone else on Caprica that would have flown the Raptor with Sharon (cos I think Helo’s character is great). The scenes on a nuked Caprica that eerily looked like Vancouver early on a Sunday morning filmed through a yellow filter were…silly.
d. The Colonials’ home world should have been called Kobol and the twelve tribes like Caprica should have been nations on that world. Apparently, that was the original plan but it was dropped to honour the original series.
e. The ragtag fleet should have had more than 50,000 people in it. Let’s say 500,000. With the original small population, I always felt that the New Caprica storyline felt a little ridiculous. You had an analogue for occupied Iraq in what must have been the equivalent of a small town. It’s not exactly Basra, is it?
f. The Cycle of Time should have been something that really had more resonance throughout the series. And humanity’s home world should have been Earth all along:
1. The pilot is set 150,000 years in the future.
2. 150,000 years before the events of BSG, a race of artifical intelligence rebels against humans on Earth (our Earth). They are defeated and are exiled into space. Some years later, they return and wipe out humanity. A small group of surviving organic humans flee the solar system after interstellar travel has been discovered (or re-discovered – see below). They eventually find their way to the planet Kobol.
3. Dark Ages on Kobol. Much of humanity’s previous history and technology is forgotten. The rise of the twelve great nations/tribes. Polytheistic Olympian religion rises on Kobol; its holy scriptures misunderstands that Kobol is the homeworld of humanity but that a 13th tribe left for a distant planet called Earth many hundreds of centuries before after a terrible War of the Gods.
4. Technological revolution on Kobol. The creation of the Cylons. The First Cylon War. Articles of Colonisation. Defeat of the Cylons. The return of the Cylons and the Fall of Kobol.
5. 500.000 refugees guarded by the Galactica make their exodus to Earth.
6. The series plays out as per OTL apart from the encounters with ancient temples and opera houses on the original series’ Kobol. These can be merged with various encounters with waymarkers on the route to earth like the Temple of Five or the ancient probe. The Human/Cylon alliance works out as per OTL.
7. The fleet eventually discover Earth as a nuked, dead wasteland (love that anti climax in the OTL series when they discover the nuked original Earth). Galactica and the fleet start to fall apart to internal fighting and despair as they linger in the solar system, discovering various remains of humanity. One thing they discover is that they originally came from Earth. And then they detect something in the vicinity of Jupiter, in an episode that - lo and behold - is called 'The Eye of Jupiter'.
8. Final show down with the Cylons near the orbit of Jupiter. This will take place near a handwavium spacial anomaly/time bridge/naked singularity/whatever. It seems that ancient humanity had built some kind of stargate in the vicinity of the Jovian moon Iapetus (nod to 2001: a Space Odyssey there). Now the Cylons have brought their forces there as they know it acts as a time bridge back to a time when Earth is populated with the hated humans. Yes, I know time travel is a bit crap but is it any worse than discovering a bunch of separately evolved humans on a planet a million light years away (to quote Adama in the OTL series)? Convergent evolution is amazing…but…c’mon…
9. Humans win at huge cost. Most of the fleet is destroyed, leaving a very small number of humans on a single ship, possibly the Galactica but maybe a single lifeboat. It enters the singularity, get taken back 300,000 years into the past. Humans settle in Africa only after abandoning their lifeboat which is now beyond repair.
10. Final scene shows the rediscovery of the remains of an ancient ship in Africa that seems to have FTL capability. Time still runs its article about Mitochondrial Eve.