Every time I told people that I was watching Battlestar Galactica for the first time, they were shocked that I hadn't already seen it. My Star Wars and Star Trek credentials would suggest that I would've definitely watched it long ago, perhaps even as the show was originally airing, but alas. Back in 2004 I was very busy... well, I'm not sure what I was busy doing. Playing a lot of Diablo II and Civilization II mostly, I think. But for whatever reason, I didn't watch a lick of BSG when it first came out.
But in 2023, after watching Katee Sackhoff kick ass in another season of the Mandalorian (which, screw you guys, I enjoyed season 3 despite its flaws), I finally saddled up and started watching BSG. I caught the first 1.5 seasons on Peacock in full binge mode, as right after I started, they added a note that the show would be leaving Peacock at the end of the month. It was June 27th.
I investigated some other ways to watch the show after it left Peacock, but ultimately my motivation petered out until earlier this year when I noticed it was available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. I started up again and discovered that I had apparently managed to stop watching right at a massive lull in the action; once I picked the series back up, the excitement ramped back up and I zipped through the rest of the four-season show.
There are a lot of things to like about Battlestar Galactica. The aforementioned Sackhoff is one of the biggest bright spots towards the back half of the show, but there are strong performances across the cast. And the premise of the show is fantastic. How would a small group of humans try to survive as a caravan of space-bound refugees, after a massive, near-complete genocide of their species? The idea is compelling, albeit bleak.
Unfortunately, I think this is a show whose whole comes up a little short of the sum of its parts. The individual characters are interesting, the twists are mostly cool, and there are some awesome concepts for the sorts of scenarios that would develop in such an environment. But the execution of these ideas ends up being a little bit of a disappointment. The characters are interesting, but the ways they interact sometimes feel wooden; a lot of the dialogue in the show had an unnatural sort of tone to it.
This is also a weird thing to complain about, but this show had some of the least believable portrayals of drunkenness that I've seen in shows or movies. I've seen drunk people, like, a lot of drunk people. The drunk people on Galactica seemed like sober people trying to act drunk.
HEAVY SPOILERS BELOW!
My biggest complaint, though, is with the culmination of the show. Any sort of science fiction property has the tall task of trying to explain how something impossible is possible. It doesn't have to be elaborate though; Jurassic Park found one idea that seems feasible enough to a layman (ancient mosquitos with dinosaur blood in dried amber), and they handwaved the rest with "cloning" and "computers." Done. Perfect.
From the very beginning of Battlestar Galactica, we had the question of how is Gaius Baltar seeing this image of his seemingly deceased Cylon lover when no one else is seeing her, and what's her purpose? We dance around the idea of Baltar having some kind of microchip in his brain, of him being a Cylon himself, or simply a fabrication of a traumatized mind. And in the end... angels? Angels is your explanation? And that's essentially the explanation for Starbuck too? But even with all of that, we don't get any actual meaningful vision or interaction with this "higher power," just a quick zinger at the very end of the show about how "he doesn't like" being called God. The whole thing felt cheap and lazy, and took so much of the air out of the show for me.
In the end, it was a fantastic premise that had some amazing moments and stretches, but in the end didn't live up to its full potential. I'd be absolutely game for a modern team giving it another try though.
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