For those of you who haven't bothered to watch it - and, from the ratings numbers, that seems to be a whole lot of you, aside from television critics and die-hard SciFi fans - I can pretty safely say that the "re-imagined" version of Battlestar Galactica is not for you.
Way back when, in the dark days of 1978 when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, I was a fan of the original Battlestar Galactica, brought to us by Glen Larson. I never missed an airing, and I was heart-broken when ABC cancelled it at the end of the first season. But even then, I was aware that the show had some significant problems. Killer robots that couldn't shoot straight. The annoying cute kid that served no purpose. Wild West episodes in space. Characters that were so one-dimensional that if they turned sideways, you wouldn't be able to see them. The first thing they do after the genocide of their race and destruction of their home worlds is stop at a "casino planet" and have a party. "Space fighters" that maneuvered as if they were in an atmosphere. The list could go on and on, but still, there was something epic in the premise of the show that kept me watching, even though, sadly, the show itself consistently failed to live up to that premise.
But the show was cancelled, life went on as it generally does, and it became just something else from childhood that one looks back fondly on (and, yes, I'll admit that when I see the original show now, it makes me wince). Then Ronald Moore decided to pick up the reins (and let's really not go into how he became involved) and present his "re-imagination" of Battlestar Galactica.
Well, that got my interest. Moore brought a lot of SciFi experience to the table, from all of his years working on the various Star Trek franchises. He generally delivered solid episodes for that franchise, and he promised a vision for Battlestar Galactica that would be more faithful to the scenario underlying the show. Yeah, this was something I wanted to see, a show that wouldn't forget that it was forged out of the destruction of the human race at the hands of an implacable enemy, that found itself hunted and having to cope and survive with almost nothing.
The miniseries that aired on the SciFi Channel really left me hoping that it would be picked up as a series. There were powerful moments of dramatic tension - the choice, for example, between abandoning those who don't have the ability to run, or staying and attempting to save everyone at the risk of losing everything. The characters were presented as actual multi-dimensional human beings, with virtues and vices, and who did not always answer the call of the angels of their better nature. There were things that didn't work, too, but by and large, Moore had delivered on his promise, at least with the miniseries. And I wanted more.
Which eventually came, when the SciFi Channel did, indeed, pick up the new Battlestar Galactica as a series. The first season, on the whole, was very good television, certainly better than anything I had seen on network TV for a long time. But . . .
Ah, yes, but. There were problems. That happens, of course, with any show, especially in its first season, when it's "finding its feet." There were episodes that felt rushed, such as Litmus, ostensibly about investigating Cylon infiltrators hiding among the survivors. This was a story arc that could have been profitably played out over many episodes, but was instead hurried to a conclusion so that it could be wrapped up in the confines of a single episode. There were creeping logic errors, such as in the episode Water, in which Galactica's supply of potable water is sabotaged. In one moment, we had Commander Adama, the ship's commanding officer, explaining to Laura Roslin, the notional President, that his ship stored enough water for "several years" and that the water recycling systems were "nearly 100% effecient." In the very next moment, however, half of the water storage tanks are blown up, and all of a sudden the ship is almost out of water and the survival of everyone who depends on that water is in jeopardy. It was as if the writers had completely forgotten about what they had just written. In the same episode, they included a scene in which they detailed an ungodly amount of food and vegetables needed to feed all the survivors on a weekly basis - and then promptly forgot all about it, never to mention it again. In a later episode, Hand of God, this refugee fleet suddenly developes a fuel shortage, which they solve by raiding an enemy base and acquiring "enough fuel for years."
Oops. Say, what happened to the reality of it all? Why are we suddenly resorting to the magical SciFi cliches? Oh, well, things will get better in the second season. Right?
Well, no. Season Two started off okay, but the creeping errors were still there and, if anything, getting worse. The episode where an officer orders a really stupid attack on a Cylon outpost that's pretty much guaranteed to get everyone killed, only to get shot by one of his own people. Problem is, not ten seconds later, in the ensuing firefight with the Cylons, we find out that our little band of humans had a grenade launcher with them the whole time, which they could have used in the first place to eliminate the Cylons. I guess they forgot about it in all the excitement. Commander Adama hands over a nuclear weapon to a civilian, but doesn't insist on actually maintaining any kind of security over it. We get introduced to a "peace movement," that ostensibly has wide support among the survivors, but we never heard about it before and we certainly don't hear about it again after the episode. We find out that there is an active black market that is thriving in the fleet - yet, with no money and no way to actually manufacture anything, how could that be?
The second season was all about character development, yet the characters never progressed. All they did was rehash the same old personality conflicts, episode after episode. It got old, and it got boring. These people were stuck in amber; nothing was ever concluded, nothing was ever resolved. But we did get a caricature of a military officer that was so bad, the only thing she lacked was a handlebar mustache to twirl. So that's something, I guess.
Then, at the end of the season, we were given the infamous "one year later" leap . . . The only purpose to which, it seems, was to reset the entire show to where it was at the beginning of the miniseries. Leaving aside all the plot holes, continuity errors and dropped plotlines from the first two seasons, by doing that Moore and his writers completely junked every plotline they had established. It served absolutely no purpose at all, save for that the writers must have felt that they had somehow pushed themselves into a corner and had no other way out. But it killed the story.
The third season was just a disaster of epic proportions. Any thought of story continuity went out the window, with episodes contradicting each other. It became entirely character-driven, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but these characters continued to go absolutely nowhere. They just spun their wheels week after week, fighting the same fights among themselves. It was as if the show had morphed from asking the question in the first season of, "How do we survive?" to asking, by the third season, "How can I possibly make this situation worse?" It became like watching a train wreck: you really don't want to, but the sight of two locomotives smashing into each other is just so morbidly fascinating, you can't seem to tear your eyes away.
And now we wait to see what the fourth and final season of this Battlestar Galactica will bring. Personally, I'm hoping that the entire refugee fleet runs into a convenient black hole . . .
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