Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica…frak the Cylons!

You know, this is a watershed time for TV. Sure, there’s a lot of crap on, but there also a lot of really great watershed shows which will go down in history. “Lost” is one, “Battlestar Galactica” is another. There are many other good shows on TV that I can talk about, but right now these are the two shows which I absolutely positively without a shadow of a doubt cannot miss.

What’s surprising to me is that I actually started to watch Battlestar Galactica (hereafter referred to as BSG). I had vaguely heard of the original sci-fi series created in 1979, but I had never seen it before. When I heard the talk of a re-imagining on Sci-Fi, I decided to check out the original via a $5.50 purchase at Walmart. That purchase price alone should have told me how good it wasn’t (.  It was totally corny, and after 10 minutes I took it out of my DVD player. I didn’t chuck it, but I haven’t watched it again. Based on that, and the general cheesiness of most of Sci-Fi’s original movies and TV-series (with apologies to “Dune” and “Children of Dune”; those two kicked major booty), I decided to not worry about it whenever it came on.

Then one fateful Saturday night, I was sitting down at home in front of the TV. By chance, my remote fell on NBC, a channel I hate and try to avoid watching except for “Scrubs” and “My Name Is Earl.” The show on NBC at that moment was the BSG mini-series/pilot, and it was just starting. Given that I hate NBC, and I thought that the show was going to be stupid, I should have just flipped the channel. However, it was a Saturday night and thus nothing was on anyway, the women on the show were pretty fine, and the story/production seemed to be pretty good. I wouldn’t have known it was a SciFi channel production by looking at it, hehehehe. So, I sat back and gave the show a fair shot.

Two hours later, I was a BSG addict, checking off the series premiere date in my schedule book. I was a true believer, and I was HOOKED.

What hooked me? Well, firstly this wasn’t a scifi show like Star Trek:TNG or Voyager; it was more like Deep Space Nine. The show wasn’t about someone’s vision of what the future would be like; indeed we don’t even know whether or not BSG is set in the future or past. The humans in this show live in another world (12 worlds, actually) who only know of Earth as a mythological 13th colony whose existence may not even be real. This show doesn’t rely on sci-fi tech stuff or situations to escape from. This show is character-driven and the events in the show universe serve to explore character interactions with these events, rather than having the show focus on the events themselves. This is a sci-fi show for people who don’t like sci-fi. It’s a wonderfully written drama that just happens to be set in another universe.

The basic plot is straight-forward enough: the humans of this world created sentient machines called Cylons to be their servants. The machines rebelled, and there was a very long war that ended in an armistice. The Cylons packed up and went away to who-knows-where; at the start of the pilot, no one had heard from them in 40 years. However, they return with a bang (nuking all of the 12 colonies with nary an advance warning), and with a new look; there are 12 models that look human. As of this season, we know of 6 models; but no one knows what the other 6 models look like. The survivors of this holocaust are a motley crew of ships with one Battlestar called the Galactica as their only protection. This crew (less than 50,000 population) are making their way to Earth, which may not even exist as far as they know but only a few people know that. Between fleeing from a relentless enemy, carrying the burden of survival, knowing that your enemy looks like you and you don’t know who may be a cylon, life can be stressful. And that doesn’t even include the stresses and drama you have with your fellow humans…

Check it out…