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A big part of the problem, I imagine, is behind the scenes.
I love Babylon 5 but there is a lot of reverential nonsense written about that show.
One chestnut is that it's a fully planned novel for television which despite a few necessary tweaks (beyond the writer's and production staff's control) told the whole story.
Clearly that's not true.
Even if you take into account that much of the meat of the intended series 5 was bumped into series 4 because of a genuine belief that the show was being canceled, leaving series 5 with a big hole to fill there is still a lot of dragged out filler and huge chunks of the story left not touched upon.
Indeed series 5 introduces a huge chunk of this hanging story ledge so what gives?
When series 5 was cleared TNT wanted to spin off the show with Crusade and funded series 5 and the television movies to lead into this spin off show.
So rather than getting a Series 5 that covered telegraphed storylines like "The Telepath War" and the "Drakh War" beyond just a few hints here and there we got those storylines tickled forward rather than a march towards the conclusion because the spin off would need to pick up these threads.
The television movies too pointed at material and general themes that the next show could carry on with.
When Crusade was shafted by TNT (much like the shafting Caprica got from SyFy) those storylines died with the show.
You could read the novels etc but that's not the same as watching the show just as watching Anakin in The Clone Wars doesn't really make up for the lack of characterisation in the PT.
If you look at series 5 of NuBSG it matches series 5 of B5 in many ways.
The long drawn out cult of Baltar thread is practically the long drawn out cult of Byron thread revisited.
It's slightly less annoying but it's still frustrating that at that point in the story television hours are being spent bouncing back there when all it seems to do is underline what we already suspected, that the 'head beings' are real and not some sort of Cylon deception or a human delusion.
It's a plot tickle instead of a plot stride, just as Byron's cult might have eventually led to something in Crusade but doesn't do much on it's own, Baltar's cult might have led back to something in Caprica but on it's own it doesn't do much.
The motivation and backstory of the 'angels' and the 'God thing' were tickled along in a similar fashion and from what we saw of Caprica it was clearly meant to be a major theme for that show to develop but as that show withered on the vine it never manifested and I doubt if Blood And Chrome will even go there as it's now seen to be a toxic concept.
If I had my own way (which I never do) these giant sagas would be written, cast, and filmed, from beginning to end (at least to a workprint stage) before the first episode is shown.
That would allow a bit of wiggle room to tweak the show as it's being broadcast and allow for the series to move from station to station without the fear of some bean counter pulling the plug before the journey ends.
It would also discourage writers from drifting aimlessly off course or stock pilling plot points for spin off shows that come to nothing.
That might make it much more difficult to get a television show commissioned but if a writer can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen and write a series of novels.
As for the three Zoe's (if you watched Caprica all the way through you'd have had the whole set).
Zoe A, is a human being and looked at from the outside human beings can often look like utterly unlikable gits (indeed almost every character in Caprica is like this so why focus on Zoe alone?), when you have a personal relationship with someone you get to see the gittish behaviour in a wider context (sometimes it's just the rough you take with smooth, sometimes it's the nearest you get to smooth on a huge iceberg of more rough hiding under the surface).
Zoe B is a related but different character.
She has her progenitor's memories and some character traits but she is also a unique being trying to balance her inherited self from her divergent AI self.
Angel Zoe seems to also be a related character but from the little we saw of her she also seemed to have an identity unique to the other two with a very different agenda.
If the show was allowed to progress without interference this could have been a fascinating way of exploring the hanging stories of NuBSG (it might have become tedious beyond endurance) but because this sort of thing wasn't introduced into the parent show and the spin off was strangled at birth we will never know and that is frustration, the worst of all emotional states and something we Science Fiction/Fantasy devotees have had more than enough of already.
