OK. Granted, TOS and TNS have glaring holes that my fuzzy recollection of TOS and my little knowledge of TNS had little chance of reconciling. But i want to try some ducking and dodging anyway because i think BSG deserves a canon, especially in light of its resurrected success.
To me, TOS was like
Star Wars with a great twist and as a tv series, to boot. IMO i don't think the whole concept of it was ever given the respect that it deserved. With TNS, i think it is finally getting some of that respect.
Besides all that, there are holes in the
Star Trek canon, too.
i'm a greeny in a lot of ways, except that as i kid i watched TOS religiously. Not thinking the show would ever come back, the memories got kind of stale. You and Chalcedony and Xenu and Blade Runner, etc., etc., know a lot more about what is and what isn't with the series and its science and technology.
Please shoot as many holes into my ideas as you can. That's how canon's are born. ;D
So, here goes. Some of this is going to be a stretch, obviously.
In TOS the Cylon War had raged for a thousand years, and the
Galactica herself was 500 years old. In TNS, the
First Cylon War started about fifty years ago, lasted only ten years, and the
Galactica was built during that war.
i'll get to the Galactica's age (and its crew) later on. TNS is going to be the starting point in history, specifically the mini, and TOS is going to be the future. There is no way getting around that.
The number of Cylon Wars are irrelevant. There have been many wars between enemies where a peace or detente was established and then broken. After a thousand years, there may have been many stoppages in the war.
The technology is different. In TNS they do instantaneous "hyper-light" point-to-point FTL jumps. In TOS they have a very confused galactic topography but clearly
don't have a jump-based system.
Perhaps, and this is the first stretch, for the same reasons that there are no networked computers on the Galactica. One of the underlying concepts of BSG is a group of refugees fighting an enemy of ever-advancing technology by simplifying its defense. By the time we get to TOS, the Cylons have made FTL jumps fatal.
The enemies are different. In TOS, the Cylons are the purely mechanical constructs of a long-dead alien civilization. In TNS, the Cylons are humanity's own recent (and partially biological!) creations, motivated in part by a mysterious religion.
The TOS Cylons (why don't i just use a Baltar expression and call them "toasters") are the ones that Six says "have their uses" in the mini. They
would be the constructs of a long-dead civilization by the time of TOS: the citizens of the Colonies.
The galaxy is different. In TOS, the galaxy is full of habitable planets and widely populated with human settlements. In TNS, the galaxy is a "desolate place" in which even
water is rare (!) and they have yet to see a single outpost of ANY kind of life.
Over the years, the refugees start "having babies" and have multiplied to the point where there is no room left on their ships. Sometime between TNS and TOS, they find habitable planets and spread out as way of assuring survival. By TOS, these settlements flourish.
TNS start at the beginning of the first technological leap for the Cylons, 12 Colonies have been nuked, humanity is down to 50,000 people, and they have just leaped into "unchartered" space.
Now for the age of the Galactica and its crew. This is probably the biggest stretch and i'm going to take literary liberties with this one.
Yes, the Galactica in TOS is 500 years old, because the first Galactica was destroyed 500 years ago.
OK, OK, that's the best i could come up for right now.
i mention the crew, because the obvious question comes up: the names. First, keep in mind that the only two characters from the TOS who had full names were Cmdr. Adama and Col. Tigh.
1) By the time of TOS, "Apollo", "Starbuck" and "Boomer" have become the titles given to the two lead viper pilots and the lead recon pilot of any given battlestar in honor of those who helped lead the first refugees from the Colonies. Kind of like being Catholic and getting an extra name at confirmation.
2) "Baltar" becomes the name of anyone who becomes the leader of the Cylons.
3) The names of Adama and Tigh have a long military history by the time of TOS, and, well, it just so happened that the Cmdr. and XO in TOS have the same last names as those in TNS.
Well, there it is. Fire away!
you can't combine TOS ("built by reptiles") with TNS ("built by humans").
