The Science Fiction Review TV Battlestar Galactica: The Plan (2009)

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan (2009)

BSG The Plan Movie Cover

I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from The Plan except that it was more BSG content, and that I just needed to watch it. The first glimpse I had of it was toward the end of the BSG series finale when there was an ad near the end. At the time I wasn’t sure if it was another series, mini-series, or just a feature like Razor. I was already pumped about Caprica, which came out just a little after the series finale. Because Syfy (formerly SciFi) released The Plan so much later, I had completely forgotten about it until one of my friends told me it was out.

Anyway, I had been hoping that The Plan would answer some of the burning questions I had from the series finale. I was extremely disappointed. The Plan came off to me as a disjointed series of events that kind of filled in some of the behind the scenes stuff that happened throughout the series. Since it has been seven months since I’ve seen any BSG, a lot of the stuff they covered I had completely forgotten about. I can honestly say that The Plan really doesn’t add much to the overall series. Sure, we get to see the “human” side of one of the Simon and Brother Cavil models, but I don’t think it really was needed. We already knew that the various models had the ability to break out of their programming.

At the end all I really thought to myself was, “Huh, that’s it?” While the running time of The Plan is that of a movie, it definitely is not a movie. It really reminds me much of those “flashback” episodes that rehash old content. I really HATE those types of episodes, no matter what program it is. The Plan isn’t exactly that, but it is close enough for me to say that I didn’t really enjoy it. Sure, I did learn some decent tidbits of info, but nothing groundbreaking. If you are a die-hard BSG fan like me, this is a must to watch, but otherwise I’d say this one can be skipped.

1 thought on “Battlestar Galactica: The Plan (2009)”

  1. Yeah, I was disappointed in The Plan. When they advertised it at the end of BSG, I thought it was going to be the whole series all over again, except from the Cylon perspective. I thought that would be cool. But instead it felt like an after-the-fact clip show, and it came so much after the fact that some of the fill in’s weren’t very useful, since I couldn’t remember all the details from the show anyway. Overall, it was disappointing. I hope Caprica is better. 🙂

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I think IBM might have been in a rush to show off their new creation. It was interesting to see the answer confidence levels during the rounds, often revealing some really wacky possible answers. Watson crashed several times during the second day of filming, nothing a regular viewer would notice while watching the recorded match on TV.  One criticism I’ve heard about the match was that Watson was fed the questions electronically rather than relying on voice and character recognition. I have to agree that the electronic delivery could have been an advantage.  Had voice recognition and OCR  functionality been used in Watson, the victory would be quite a bit more impressive. I could clearly see the two mere mortals struggling to buzz in and shake in frustration when Watson was faster. The producers touted the physical buzzer plunger that Watson had to activate, but I still think that Watson had the advantage.

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