Battlestar Galactica

I used to watch this show when I was a kid, and even more recently, they’ve been playing some those original episodes on SciFi. SciFi Channel produced a two-part four hour miniseries that gives the old ship a new look. Not to mention an entirely different twist on an old concept, which many many fans were very skeptical about.

We’ve gone through this before with Star Trek, when TNG was about to premeire, all the fans were pretty skeptical about this new crew. They wanted their old pals Kirk and Spock, and instead they got Picard and Riker. In the end, TNG won over the audience and even to this day is considered by many to be the best of the incarnations (even though I think they’re wrong and DS9 was the best). Battlestar Galactica’s reincarnation ruled all. Okay, so Starbuck and Boomer are girls, and Apollo is played by Jamie Bamber (the late Fourth Lieutenant Kennedy from the Horatio Hornblower saga) instead of Robert Hatch, but even so… comparing this new series to the old one just isn’t fair on so many levels.

For one thing, Edward James Olmos blows Lorne Greene out of the fucking water in acting and style. I mean, Lorne Greene’s Commander Adama was this swashbuckling kind of guy, as I recall, but Olmos quiet authority is more like what I expect in a ship commander than acting like a cowboy. While we’re on the subject of Commander Adama… why is he a Commander? They really fucked the rank system over in this show. It goes: Ensign, Lieutenant, Captain, Major, Lt. Colonel, Colonel, then Commander. What the fuck? Anyway, still have to hand it to Olmos for really raising the bar on acting. If he played a Picard-like character in Star Trek, he definitely would have given Patrick Stewart a run for his money. Hell, we’ve never seen a Hispanic actor in a lead role on a science-fiction show before. We’ve had white people and black people, but never a brownie. 😉 Way to go on the enthic diversity test, there. I really liked the feel of the officers and crew, and hey, we actually see enlisteds and non-comms in major roles en masse, rather than the token Chief O’Brien.

I hope they make this into a series, because I’d never miss an episode. Post your own reviews below 🙂

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