TDL-evision: Battlestar Galactica - Season 1
My friend Doug has been hounding me for a good six months to start watching Battlestar Galactica. He and I are usually pretty much on the same wavelength when it comes to movies and TV shows so I dropped it in the Netflix Queue for after The 4400.
The set-up to the series is pretty simple. Humans create robots. Robots become self-aware. Robots attack humans. War ensues. War ends in a draw. Robots go away for 50 years. Robots figure out how to create create robots that look human. Robots find God. Robots infiltrate human civilization and nuke them. We pick up the series as the Battlestar Galactica, a warship created in the first conflict, is to be decommissioned. The decommissioning ceremony is interrupted by total war.
Another one in the win column for Doug.
Finding a good sci-fi series is really, really hard. Either the acting horrible (anything on the Sci-Fi network), the storylines have very little respect for the abject geekdom of the fan base or the source material (Enterprise), or it’s really good and gets killed before its time (Firefly). With BSG none of those things happened (except maybe the killed before its time thing… I’ll get back to you on that after I see all four seasons).
Having never seen the original series (or ever having known it existed) I had no expectations going in to this show. This is probably a good thing; it seems like most people who went in expecting a Star Trek to Star Trek: The Next Generation progression were sorely disappointed. Instead they were treated to an almost complete re-imagining of the universe. I can’t really speak to those differences as I never watched the original series, but suffice it to say that the Wikipedia pages on the original series don’t share too many plot-points. This leads me to believe that there is an intense geek-war on which of the two series is better. I don’t have any of that to deal with.
The first season is pretty much split in to two main plot arcs. The first deals with the Cylons’ (those are the robots) new ability to look human. They have implanted sleeper agents in to the human world who they themselves don’t even know they’re robots. The second deals with how the human race (population after the extermination: 48,000) survives and reconstructs the government. For most of the season there is a gentle power struggle between Commander Adama (the highest ranking remaining military official and the captain of Battlestar Galactica) and President Laura Roslin (the Secretary of Education who becomes president because the rest of the cabinet is killed). For the most part, those two stories are more than enough to carry the first 13-episode order.
One issue: can I get one male on the show that isn’t evil, stupid, or so weak-willed as to compromise the survival of the race to get a little tail? Here is a list: The Cylons are able to bring down the humans’ defenses because Number Six (Tricia Helfer) is able to seduce Dr. Baltar (James Callis), the smartest man on the planet, into giving her defense codes. The chief of engineering hides his suspicions that one of the pilots is a may be a sleeper agent. The evil, male-run military vs. the peaceful female-run presidency. Cigar-smokin, order-betraying, bad-ass Kara “Starbuck” Thrace who knows better than her male superior officer. Again, not to say that there’s anything wrong with any of the above, but a little variety would be nice.
All told: I can’t wait until season two gets here.