Battlestar Galactica

You’re down at K-Mart or Sears, looking at all those shiny new PlayStation 2 games in the sharp glass case; which one is the lady behind the counter going to bring out for you?

The problem is not that Battlestar Galactica has tranformed science fiction television. The problem is that it has set such an impossibly high bar that its future imitators won’t be able to surpass it. I just got to watching Friday’s episode. This fourth and final season, every single episode goes places I have never seen in any sort of fiction, science or otherwise. I’m not even going to try and urge you to watch it. You do or you don’t. All I want to say here is, sometimes something comes along that changes all the rules. There has been a lot of good SF on TV – Babylon 5 was pretty awesome, but it went a different way. B5 was a mirror held up to the Star Trek shows that said, here are the parts of your shiny happy world you never talk about. Battlestar Galactica says, fuck the future. This is a cruel story, and all cruel stories end the same way.

What really happened at the end of Battlestar Galactica? Here’s a frame-by-frame examination of the last few seconds. It’s full of spoilers, so DO NOT read further unless you have seen the episode, “Maelstrom”. In this episode, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace is haunted by visions that she is on the verge of a greater destiny. She comes to terms with the memories of her abusive mother and then deliberately dives into the eye of a storm on a gas giant that looks (to her) like the mandala she has been seeing since she was a child. Her ship explodes – but was she in it? ...

It’s a new year and time for all the shows that left us hanging last year to finally get around to rescuing us from that cliff. Read on for spoilers, rumors, speculation and rabid fangirl-ism for Avatar: The Last Airbender, Battlestar Galactica, and Doctor Who. Tomorrow I’ll finish up with Heroes, Lost, Robin Hood, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I went without television for more than five years. There was nothing on worth paying the cable company to see. A couple of years back I started hearing about shows that sounded really intriguing – I rescued an old 15" TV from my closet and watched a couple through layers of static. And yeah, they were good. They were incredible, actually. Last March I subscribed to cable and though I don’t watch a lot of television, there are shows I never miss. ...

I’ve been in and out of the SciFi Channel’s website for the past couple of weeks working on my Who Wants to be a Superhero article; I’m surprised I didn’t see that Battlestar Galactica would be showing little “webisodes” leading up to the beginning of the third season on October 6th. The first one, posted yesterday, is Day 67 of the Occupation: Resistance. If you like seeing quality science fiction on television (my likes: ST:TNG, Firefly, Babylon 5, Farscape, The Prisoner, UFO (not Project UFO), Doctor Who; dislikes: Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, X-Files), you need to be watching Battlestar Galactica. And if you love BG like I do, you’ll want to see these webisodes. And if you want the SciFi channel to focus more on quality science fiction and less on wrestling or whatever, watch their good stuff. ...