"Virtuality TV movie, which was originally a pilot for a sci-fi series" translation, Fox viewed what they had and it like the Bionic woman sucked. Honestly I don't know why people like Battlestar Galactica. It is the single most boring scifi genera show I have ever seen. Ronald D. Moore sucks.

Yep it was so boring. All that space combat was just dumb. And don't get me started on the characters and there development. And the actors were so terrible...man BSG sucked so bad. The only show worse was Farscape.

I'm just gonna stick with the 900 Star Gate shows

The sets look terrible... Jon Pertwee era Dr. Who

I actually think the sets look more like what woudl actually be designed than the sets for most scifi shows manage. Compare the group shot to images form the crew compartments on the space shuttle.

lol. where's eric kripke? he may be interested in this.

WHAT? BSG is the best show ever made. Methos, you are boring and you suck.

FFS....so this won't be a series, after all? I was kind of looking forward to it, at least for a limited run. Every day, I just get closer to swearing off TV (and killing my $100/mo. cable bill)...

I'm a massive Ron Moore fan and a decent Michael Taylor fan, so I can't fracking wait!

Virtual reality is an exotic form of drug use. It stands to exceed the excitement of a mission in space.

I hated it when on TNG's cast would go to the holo deck. They were on a Star ship captain for crying out loud!!! Can't TV writers come up with something more exciting than pretending to be a early 19th century PI?

that dosent bode well
means fox has no interest in the show
which means it either sucks outright or they dont belive it will do well where they want to put it-no other reason for such an obvious death sentence...

I totally agree with you on TNG's use of the holodeck, unRiel. DS9 used it wonderfully, however, mostly because the stories were so good, including the James Bond ep and the Vic Fontaine ones.

xxgatorxx, according to Fox, the show was too complex for audiences.

"xxgatorxx, according to Fox, the show was too complex for audiences."

Perhaps just too complex for FOX executives to understand.

I didn't watch DS9, but as one tool in a toolbox, a VR room like a holo deck might allow a creative team to explore characters, but basing a whole show on it, why do they need to be traveling through space? Doesn't space offer enough mysteries?

Little can be gleaned about an entire show from a couple of promo pictures. Genre fans have certainly earned being called "hard to please" and "quick to judge." It's a wonder any show survives. I'll check out this feature when Fox airs it because I'm curious. It might turn out to be junk - but I won't label it as such before I actually see it.

hey Methos, you are such a badass. Way to tell those BSG fans. Nobody is as cool as you.

Shame this isn't going to be a series. It seemed pretty dark from the leaked script... actually, I can't think of anything in the genre on TV that has ever been that dark. I mean, it has a virtual reality rape scene.

RDM should have known better than to try and work with FOX on this. It certainly seems more like cable material.

Exactly my thoughts, ecgordon. Fox has destroyed enough good shows, including Millennium by dumbing it down for Season 2. Season 1 is perfection!

UnRiel, the focus of DS9 was on the characters, so the holosuites allowed one character to rehabilitate himself after a war injury; it was a fantastic episode and the holographic character with whom he interacted had sentience, so it was a great psychological study. The James Bond ep was just a great comedic romp. Both were written by Ronald D. Moore, by the way.

The only this worse than having FOX reject ur sci fi pilot is to have them pick it up. RDM dodged a bullet this time.

Oh Joy, another Ron Moore Angsty, Gritty, Dysfunctional garbagefest. Don't be holding your breath for a series of this thing.
"Space, the Final Frontier, these are the voyages of the Starship Enter... oops, Photon, oops, I mean Phaeton. It's 5 year, oops, 10 year mission, to seek out new life, oops, to spend their time whacked out on the Holodeck, oops, the "Virtuality Simulator"..."

Space really isn't that exciting...it is what you get at the end that is exciting. Earth...accelerate for 5 years...decelerate for 5 years...destination! Have you ever spent 10 years on a boat, with no shore leave....

They invented the plot device of FTL to get rid of the fact that it would be an incredibly long and boring journey to travel from place to place in space.

(The fact that is would be boring does not put me off it...I'd still go in an instant! Also you can take readings of stuff and analyze it , that would give you something to do. :) )

>as one tool in a toolbox, a VR room like a holo deck might allow a creative team to explore characters, but basing a whole show on it, why do they need to be traveling through space? Doesn't space offer enough mysteries?

No, not if it's being treated realistically. Space is really really really big, and to get anywhere interesting takes a really really really long time, in cramped conditions. Most shows get around this with warp drive or hyperspace, but, just for a change, I'd welcome a show that treats it more or less honestly, and makes the ways the characters cope with that (including virtual reality being a feature that drives many of the plots) one of the features.

"Oh, making the voyage long, slow and boring will make it so reeeeeeeaaaaaaalllll" Geez,
So you're saying with Hyperdrive, they'd run out of story for this snoozefest in one episode?

Well, at least with the Jiggling Cameras and Swish Pans, the audience getting seasick will help with the excitement. After all, this is a Ron Moore presentation.

Callahan, your TV dinner is ready, please turn off WoW for a little while so that we can watch Voyager together.

I love BSG, and I'm looking forward to Caprica. So, thumbs up for Ron Moore in that front. Virtuality had some good points and bad. Good points were that the dialogue was well written and the characters were interesting, in particular the wheelchair-bound engineer / 2nd in Command. I also liked the acting. I loved the use of music, especially the reggae song. It really captured that natural feel of music you might hear on a radio, back on Earth, coupled with the vastness of space. The bad points: the plot was confused and confusing. The Earth has been hit by some ecological disaster, and so its up to the crew to change mission, and instead of searching for alien intelligence, fly off to a new solar system to save humanity? Given that a major tv network is turning their journey into a reality tv show, the ecological disaster can't have been that bad. If it was really bad enough to warrant sending a crew off in search of a new world to call home, would we really be making it into a bit of reality tv? And what exactly were the crew searching for? Intelligent life? So presumably satellite telescopes, or their ship, had already detected signs of intelligent life, or at least a life sustaining planet? You wouldn't simply send a ship and crew off to a random star system and hope that it had a life sustaining planet, not when you have 100 billion stars in this galaxy alone, and at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and potentially a multitude of universes. The pilot should have started with SETI picking up signs of an alien intelligence / a life sustaining planet which was close enough for us to reach. Then shown us the ecological disaster...it would have to be something devastating, that had wiped out a few billion human lives, together with other flora and fauna. And, it should ditch the whole reality tv plot line, because it gets tangled up with and confuses the the virtuality plot line. (This might have been considered a clever plot point, but it just confuses things, and simply doesn't work). Drop it Ron, drop it! What you could still have, however, is the crew making audio-video recordings for their loved ones, and sending them back to Earth, as they leave the solar system and enter the depths of interstellar space, heading towards a new star system. The farther they travel away from Earth, the longer it would take for each transmission to reach home, but it would still be a way for the crew to feel some kind of contact with home. if these problems were addressed, and James Callis was brought in as a member of the crew (Baltar rocks !!) it would be a great science fiction series.

I'm not usually compelled to leave a comment but I've grown tired of Sci-fi fans trashing quality television because the stories are complex and/or involve grey area morality.

Virtuality was phenomenal. The story is intriguing. Can the human conscious be uploaded to a computer and survive within the confines of a simulation? Logically selling an untested idea to the people of Earth would be difficult. Therefore a reality television show documenting the lives of the crew was required. Moore is the master of post-apocalyptic space drama. I especially enjoyed the overt criticism of societies corporation saturation.

To those that criticize the shows pacing and acting while praising cookie cutter lowest common denominator shows like stargate, this pilot/movie isn't for you.

BSG and Virtuality prove Moore has evolved from his Star Trek days. I will continue to watch everything he creates.

I think it is a fantastic show. Didn't get to see it on the 26th but I have watched the pilot several times online. The set design is amazing. Only thing I really didn't like is the phaeton watermark during the interviews, its like watching a screener. Anyway, I think it would be a damn shame to cancel it after all this publicity. They should run it agian another night or move it to FX. Would love to see more.