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« Fixing the Torture Mess | Main | Blog » January 15, 2005Battlestar Galactica RevisitedWhen the Battlestar Galactica Miniseries debuted on the SciFi channel in late 2003, I was not kind to it. As a longtime fan of the original series, the new imagining faced an uphill battle for my approval, and it fell well short of that. However, with a year's time having passed by and my expectations decidedly lower, I decided to watch the miniseries again earlier this week when I happened across it while channel-surfing. Without those heightened expectations, I was able to let go of what I wanted the new series to be and simply assess the new idea on its own merits. While I still had a number of problems with the new series, it did seem to offer more potential than I had believed. So I decided to check out the debut of the series last night; they screened the first two episodes: "33" and "Water." In order to avoid posting spoilers on the main page, I'll discuss them in the extended entry. "33" picks up approximately five days after the close of the mini-series, and it assumes you're familiar with the mini-series situation. That led to a few questions from Jim Henley, who hadn't seen it, and I'm sure he wasn't the only one. The 50,000 survivors of the Cylon attack on the colonies have been pursued relentlessly since they fled Ragnar Station. Every 33 minutes after they jump to a new location, a Cylon fleet appears and tries to destroy them. With only 33 minutes between jumps nobody has slept and both people and machinery are starting to break down. The episode is quite well done, capturing the horrific tension of lives lived under the pressure of constant attacks and near escapes, with each jump granting only a half-hour respite from fear and the never-ending hope that this time the Cylons will not succeed in following them. Things only get better when they Cylons finally do fail to follow them because the ship they're tracking fails to jump on time only to reappear a few hours later, forcing the President to decide whether or not to order Apollo and Starbuck to shoot down a civilian craft carrying some 1,300 people to save the remaining 47,000 (although, like a similar decision in the miniseries, this decision would be hard to make but isn't really a tough one). Having said that, I'm not overly thrilled with the Baltar-Cylon relationship. Baltar, of course, allowed a human-appearing Cylon to place backdoors in the code he wrote for the Colonies' defense software. These backdoors meant that the Colonies were completely defenseless against the Cylon attacks and allowed the Cylons to defeat the Colonies easily. Since that time, Baltar's Cylon girlfriend (Number Six) has appeared only to him, possibly a hallucination, possibly the result of a chip she placed in his brain. She seems to be fascinated with the idea of God, insisting that Baltar repent when it appears his role in the defeat of the Colonies will be revealed. The idea of a machine race developing religion seems rather implausible to me; the Cylons don't need an origin myth: they already have one. That was one of my problems with the miniseries, and it doesn't appear to have gotten any better in the series: the Cylons seem to be decidedly irrational. This is seen quite clearly in episode 2, "Water." Raptor pilot Boomer, a Cylon sleeper agent, wakes up soaking wet with a bomb in her backpack. She is able to cover up what she fears is her complicity in sabotage with the help of her significant other, but it's clear what she has been up to when the Galactica's port side water storage tanks are blown out. This leads to a desperate search for water and some interesting maneuvers by Boomer to avoid the appearance of culpability and by Baltar to avoid admitting that he can't actually tell the difference between real humans and Cylons. But what's left open to question is, if Boomer can get her hands on demolitions, why not blow up something a little more vital on the Galactica than her water storage tanks? Hell, why not just send a signal to the Cylon fleet and resume the 33 minute chase? The Cylons had to know they were on the verge of eliminating the last remnants of humans in their part of the galaxy after a week of chasing them, so why not just resume that until the humans break down? Obviously that would make for a lousy series, but it's the kind of question I think should be answered to maintain suspension of disbelief. Perhaps the creators have a longer-term plan that will explain all this, but right now the Cylons' motivations seem to be highly incongruent with their actions. Nonetheless, at this point I will probably continue to watch the show. It's got potential, and that's not something you can say about many TV shows, let alone scifi shows. Posted at January 15, 2005 02:40 PM
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» BSGmail from Unqualified Offerings Tracked on January 16, 2005 07:27 PM CommentsI was very disappointed that the enemy robots had changed. They were so cool when I was growing up, but now they look like something from that movie, iRobot. Posted by: Scott at January 17, 2005 09:28 AM "The idea of a machine race developing religion seems rather implausible to me; the Cylons don't need an origin myth: they already have one. That was one of my problems with the miniseries, and it doesn't appear to have gotten any better in the series: the Cylons seem to be decidedly irrational." Both the ideas that religion springs from "needing an origin myth" and that it is irrational are decidely stupid. You should have some information on a topic before you babble on in public about it. Posted by: Ali at January 18, 2005 06:14 PM Post a comment |
