Halfway through the pristine miniseries that precedes the most incisive show about post-9/11 America you realize this is your Battlestar Galactica now. Not the bubblegum, brightly lit ’70s classic, but this, the gritty, claustrophobic, white-knuckle reboot that looks nothing like the original boot.
The core idea is the same. The last remaining human survivors of an unimaginable tragedy race to find a new home while staying a hair’s breadth away from their Cylon pursuers, a race of sentient, self-aware machines who are unrecognizable from their fellow man. On each step of the journey, they’re forced to make the kind of decisions you only make in wartime. None of the options is good, and the creator Ronald D. Moore never lets any of his characters off the hook. The trauma of the choices they make stays with them for the run of the series. The question beating at the heart of every episode was this: Can a group of flawed people save mankind without sacrificing their own humanity?
The action is intense, and the special effects are great, but what separates it from its peers is the grounding of the characters. They’re not all heroes. Some are cowards, some are drunks, some are undercover Cylons who don’t even know it. Watching them figure out who they are and what roles they play in this new reality is the great joy of the show.
I watched that show during its original run, All the way through. The miniseries was awesome but the series got tiresome over time…
More recently, I binged all of Stargate: SG-1, Atlantis, the TV movies, and I just finished Universe. The latter suffers from the same problems as the rebooted BSG: the constant tension, without release or catharsis (except for very rare moments…) just becomes tiresome. Main characters constantly at each other’s throats, sometimes in obviously contrived ways, plot-wise… I endured it more than I enjoyed it.
Past sci-fi shows (for example, Berman-era Trek) may have been lacking in tension, but nu-BSG and SG:U had too much. There needs to be a cycle of tension and release in a series, so that each new bit of tension can be enjoyed again.
