It was only at the start of 2006 that I discovered just how awesome Battlestar Galactica was. I’d been meaning to check it out for some time, having seen the start of the telemovie when it was on television. But it’s very easy to put such things off. But season one made the perfect christmas present, and I write before you now knowing the true majesty of Galactica. A near-perfect opening season.

Of course, season one had a nice, manageable thirteen episodes. Season two apparently has twenty. Thus I predict that the episodes in general will only be 65% as good as the previous year. Sad, but you can’t argue with mathematics. So, just to give us some context: when we left our intrepid heroes, an away mission was trapped on the near-mythical planet of Kobol, a huge Cylon¹ ship had been destroyed, and the venerable Commander Adama had been shot twice in the torso by the unreliable but highly cute Cylon-passing-for-human, Boomer. This being Battlestar Galactica, by the end of the pre-title sequence, the Galactica has also managed to get itself attacked by another huge Cylon ship² and lose the main fleet. Things looked bad.

With Adama out of action, it was Colonel Tigh’s chance to shine. It’s a fine line to walk with this character — he should be both competent enough to make it plausible that Adama still relies on him, and yet crap enough to justify everyone else disliking him. And stay vaguely sympathetic to the audience. Both the writers and Michael Hogan managed it this story: after long moments of indecision he signs on to a reckless plan that almost gets Galactica infected with a Cylon computer virus³ which only just manages to work. Meanwhile his interrogation of Cylon-Boomer is inept and overly emotional. I feel like everything he does is a knife edge between screw-up and awesome, which makes him interesting to watch.

Lt. Gaeta, having majorly screwed up at the beginning of the story, gets to have one of those moments where a character moves a few real world objects about and suddenly works out the solution to all their problems.⁴ I’m always a bit nervous about these as I have this cynical feeling that no one has ever done this outside of film and television. But it’s over quickly and the plan is easily explainable dramatically.⁵ Part of the joy of Battlestar Galactica is how dodgy their technology is sometimes. It makes it all a lot more tense. Not having a massive screen in the bridge where the commander can see everything that’s going on at the same time really helps. There’s a lesson in here about checking how dramatically useful funky futuristic technology is before you use it in your show.

I still don’t quite understand what’s going on between Number Six and Gaius and their kid, but Gaius seems equally confused so I don’t mind as much. Galactica is back⁶ and it hits the ground running.

Second Opinion: Jackson

We could do worse than soap I feel. My personal favourite is when Character A makes an arbitrary comment, causing Character B’s eyes to widen, shout “You’re a genius!” and quickly exit.

The randomly inserted Caprica scenes are finding a relevance they lacked last season. I’ve always enjoyed them — but rather than feeling tacked on and disrupting the episode, for the first time I actually feel like they belong in the story. Which is good. Hopefully they won’t degenerate into the Helo and Starbuck show for season two. I’d like her back on Galactica — although unless Sharon feels sorry them and comes back, I don’t see how.

1. The lost artificial children of humanity, returned to wreak vengeance upon their masters, and execute their mysterious plan. Or, if you prefer, Robot Baddies. ↩
2. They just keep coming. If I was Boomer, and not a Cylon, I’d be majorly pissed off that my heroic destruction of a mothership was undermined so quickly. ↩
3. Unless it did get compromised. It was a pretty last second thing. ↩
4. Soap = Computers. ↩
5. The Galactica crew are just as nervous about all the things that could go wrong networking computers as I am. It’s a strong point of empathy for the audience. No one’s hacked into our wireless network recently but the other day Andy’s computer to television transmitter interfered with the signal and wouldn’t let me connect. We were all pretty scared but it turned out well. ↩
6. After a massive two-day break. I thought it’d never end. ↩

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Monday, February 6th, 2006. It concerns such pressing issues as Battlestar Galactica, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.