Battlestar Galactica

I want it now, you hear me now
And I want everything from BG, everything, even the in between episodes or TV movies

"Begin at the beginning", the King said, gravely, "and go till you come to the end; then stop. "

Yes.

And there will be a quiz.

Will the process include chaining you down too?

Which, incidentally, was a part of Edward James Olmos's contract. Yes, he only agreed to play the part if there were no weird alien creatures present and it was written into his contract.

Good man. Much better without aliens, they're usually far too gimmicky. (Klingons are clearly the best aliens ever created... well, apart from Aliens.)

I'm guessing Olmos wasn't a BSG nerd... so this 'tell tale' doesn't sound that implausible.

Or maybe he just did it to make sure they won't make the remake something weird. It's easy to take an old formula and turn it into next Star Trek.

The mini-series is bought! And for only $3! The show is already off to a good start with great value for money.

That's an excellent episode.

Unfortunately there are a couple of bumps on the road in the second half of season 2. 'Black Market' and 'Downloaded' (the beginning of the cylon melodrama) come to mind. Fortunately between 'Scar', 'Lay down your burdens' and the Pegasus arc, the show was in top form for the most part.

'Black Market' was a good episode for music. All the flashbacks (LOST-style) give McCreary occasion to use music very prominently. I did think the plotting of the episode was pretty weak, particularly coming off the back of the Pegasus arc.

One of my favourite episodes - one that I think is a bit underrated - is the one where * SPOILER * Baltar is interrogated following the 'Temple of Five' arc.

I don't really think of Black Market as filler, just dramatically weak, particularly in the context of the episodes surrounding it. There plenty of internal dynamics episodes that worked, this one was one of the lesser ones. I do love this show, but it had its fair share of such episodes.

My problem with 'Downloaded' is that it began to open us up to the Cylon perspective, and while I can see the thematic reasons for wanting to do that, I think that approach to telling the story robbed the show of a feeling that had been very powerful in the first two seasons. That feeling being the sense of being pursued by a force whose strategies and motivations were unclear.

I always think that in any story, there is some vital element that is best left offscreen, and I think the internal cylon dynamics were such a thing in this show. We can guess at it, try to piece it together from the little we see, but I think that would have been better than the approach they took. The unseen has a power that the seen can rarely approximate.* Once you've had a scene like the one where *spoiler* a rogue 6 and 8 kill a 3, or they vote their way to a decision around a table, with all the beauty in the air, it starts to feel like a science fiction 'Days of our Lives' - ever so slightly campy. Once 'Downloaded' was out the door, there were only a few more occasions where Cylons presented a fascinating, compelling presence. The first was Dean Stockwell's tandem speech from the brig at the end of the second season. The second was Leoben's role in 'Maelstrom', although that was probably not Leoben (and didn't feel like it at the time).

* Extending this point to 'Razor', I feel the exploits of Cain post-Cylon war pre-reunion with Galactica were also such a thing. As stories told by the drunk first officer - stories we're not quite sure whether to believe - the events shade Michelle Forbe's character with a dark capacity for compromise that we have our doubts about. It makes sense of what we see, but also we wonder how true the story is. Seeing it in 'Razor' felt like a 'colour-in-the-shapes'. A mystery became matter-of-fact.

(All this obviously reflects what I find compelling storytelling to be. I think of it as loving the show enough to know that its creators were also artists, capable of brilliant choices as well as less-than-brilliant ones.)

the episode "The Woman King" from Series 3 confirmed what I was expecting for a long time

The most respectful character in the entire Battlestar Galactica series is Helo, and since now he has my deepest sympathy.

Go Helo