At the end of July this year the Chicago Tribune broke the news that Blood and Chrome was on way as an ‘online’ series with ten episodes scheduled, this has now been updated to a two hour TV pilot.
They have Caprica co-exec, and the man who wrote the teleplay for the greenlit pilot, Michael Taylor giving this explanation of the series,
Blood & Chrome is about a young man’s initiation into war: both the realities of war as fought by soldiers on the ground (and in Battlestars and Vipers), and the somewhat less real version portrayed in the media.
He mentions The Hurt Locker and Restrepo as influences for the series, so we can expect something a little different in tone to the spacebound battles of previous series. They also mention the special effects which were to be used to bring the Cylon war to life, including the fact that before the Battlestar Galactica sets were dismantled they were scanned and are stored, waiting to be used again for this series. 3D is mentioned also, and it could be that this is the first TV series which will be enhanced on those fancy 3DTVs which are making their way into people’s homes.
Deadline have the press release which I’ve cloned below,
Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome takes place in the 10th year of the first Cylon war. As the battle between humans and their creation, a sentient robotic race, rages across the 12 colonial worlds, a brash rookie viper pilot enters the fray. Ensign William Adama, barely in his 20’s and a recent Academy graduate, finds himself assigned to the newest battlestar in the Colonial fleet… the Galactica. The talented but hot-headed risk-taker soon finds himself leading a dangerous top secret mission that, if successful, will turn the tide of the decade long war in favor of the desperate fleet. “The ‘Galactica’ universe as re-imagined by Ron Moore and David Eick is rich with possibilities and backstory,” said SyFy’s Mark Stern. “We jumped at the chance to revisit the William Adama character and explore this exciting chapter in the BSG narrative which falls between the events of the original series and the prequel, ‘Caprica,’ currently airing on Syfy.”
“While maintaining the themes of politics, social propaganda, and the timeless question: what does it mean to be human? – ‘Blood & Chrome’ will also return us to the authentic, relentless depiction of combat and the agony and ecstasy of human-Cylon war, which was the hallmark of ‘Battlestar Galactica’s’ early seasons,” said Eick. Michael Taylor wrote the teleplay from a story by Eick, Taylor and Bradley Thompson & David Weddle.
“This has all been done before and looks like it will happen again”, it was called BSG The Re-Imaged Series…..lol. This one will be just the same, only without the sexy cylons and William Adama will be half the age. That series had both ground, and space battles.
So much for a prequel that show some actually BSG history, B & C won’t be showing anything new in that area, other than what is already known.
SYFY Needs To Tie Up The Remaining Issues From Caprica Before Moving On To Blood & Chrome
Blood and Chrome will bomb out (I definitely won’t be watching it, unless they decide to at least address the remaining issues left on Caprica.) and won’t be any comparison to what Caprica could have potentially become. They still have so many issues about what happened before and leading up to the Cylon War, that needs to be addressed. They let Caprica get to the point of basically mass producing and some secretive shipping off of the cylons to the STO.
Syfy only aired 13 episodes of Caprica counting the pilot. By the time Syfy actually finishes off the first season it would have taken almost 2 full years to accomplish this, and the Whole Time Line (all 18 episodes) of Season One is only about 2 -3 months…lol. Round that out and it will have taken Syfy (at minimum) 4 times longer to air the series than the actual time line of the show’s first season… geesh. They never gave it a chance. We wanted to see BSG history and background.
All they accomplished so far was to get the cylons built. They haven’t even merged the avatar consciousnesses with the cylons yet, let alone show any social interactions of them with society except the unaired 5-8 minutes of it. That was mostly just a glimpse here and there, maybe in all 30 seconds of social interactions, on the part of the cylons. Also they still have a great number of loose ends to the characters and story lines, still to be resolved.
So what we end up with, is jumping straight into a battle that has been going on for 10 years already. No chance of filling in any of the five year gap (before the war) of story lines and cylons receiving these consciousnesses, let alone how it actually is accomplished and their initial reactions to this new way of life, so-to-speak. Let alone their interactions with society and what leads them to actually revolt against mankind to begin with. How about their starting up of the human experiments to gain skins?? Ten years into this battle they have already been doing this for some time, at this point, secretly. Just because ‘The Husker” only saw this at the end of the war, doesn’t, mean it didn’t start long before that point. They already showed ZOE-A, as a fore front for season 2 (before it was cancelled, that is) of obtaining a skin body herself…lol. tell me they can keep that a secret for 10-15 years or so…lol. That is probably how the other cylons begin to want it themselves, but we will never know that.
They would have to establish a reason as to why they wanted these skin bodies, to begin with and also gaining facilities to do this, in secret. Experiments don’t just happen overnight, also lots of prep work figuring out where and how to start etc., takes time.
All this doesn’t even start to touch on the character aspect of loose ends. We also won’t even know the real William Adama’s (from the BSG series) actual background growing up. We got to see, what maybe 30 seconds of him when he was like 4-5 years old, then instantly jump to him being about 18 – 20 years old, Big gap there. We actually didn’t get much of anything for background and what we did get was only half of it, as everything was just starting to come together, as a whole.
Syfy killed this show on purpose to make room for Blood and Chrome, not to replace a dyeing show with it. Blood and Chrome will never come close to what Caprica could have been in actual story and BSG background. It’ll be basically a younger version of Adama, with the same basic BSG battling, without the sexy cylons. They’ll be the ugly 0005’s, which are actually worse looking than the U-87’s, in my opinion.