Glenn Vance glennvance.com is the blog-space of Glenn Vance

I’ve writ­ten a lot about Lost (well, at least some about it.) on this site, and while I gen­er­ally think the show is great, it has it’s bumps and dips in the road on its way to per­fec­tion. When it’s great, it’s really great, but when it’s mediocre, or just plain bad, it’s bad. I like the show mainly for the peo­ple, which is usu­ally what keeps you around for a given length of inter­est, but some­times the writ­ing is just lacking.

I watched “Bat­tlestar Galac­tica” when it was on in 1978. I was high on Star Wars and this was the next best thing to Star Wars that we had on TV, which made sense, since many of the ILM design­ers who worked on Star Wars worked on BsG also. I even watched the crappy “Galac­tica 1980” when I was nine or ten years old. I’d also heard for years that Richard Hatch, he of Apollo fame, was attempt­ing to res­ur­rect the series and have it con­tinue from the stop­ping point of the first series. I thought it sounded lame and like some­thing that a washed up actor would try to do, kind of like how Tom Arnold keeps say­ing that there’s going to be a True Lies 2. Then I started read­ing about Ron Moore’s adap­ta­tion and how it recast many of the orig­i­nal roles and that they’d sex­i­fied the whole thing and it sounded pathetic and lame.

But then I (belat­edly) saw the minis­eries on DVD. And I was hooked.

Gone was the loop­i­ness of the first series. No more casino plan­ets. No more Ovians. No more Dagget or lum­ber­ing Cylons with their hokey swords. The Cylons were bad muthas. The apoc­a­lypse of the 12 colonies of Kobol felt real (nat­u­rally in a post 9/11 world) and imme­di­ate. There were moments where peo­ple had to make deci­sions that would get the entire fleet killed or just half of the fleet. It was gut wrench­ing to watch as the pres­i­dent decides to aban­don half of the fleet to die so that the rest of the fleet can live on to run from the bad guys another day.

And then the SciFi Chan­nel green­lit a first sea­son. And it was great. And then based on the rat­ings of that they green­lit a sec­ond sea­son, some­thing that the first series could never do. And it’s still great.

My favorite char­ac­ters from the new series are Col. Tigh and Gaius Bal­tar, two peo­ple that I never cared about from the first series. Tigh always was the nice gen­teel sec­ond in com­mand (I remem­ber very lit­tle about him) to Adama, and I remem­ber noth­ing of Bal­tar, except that I think he was already a turn­coat to the Cylons when the series began. Michael Hogan and James Cal­lis, who play Tigh and Bal­tar, respec­tively, are great, with Hogan being my favorite of the two. His Tigh is a lowlife drunk scum­bag who Adama sees some sort of value in. He’s crass, gets in fights, and is almost uni­ver­sally hated by the crew, espe­cially Star­buck. Cal­lis, who I remem­bered as the gay guy from Brid­get Jones’s Diary is hillar­i­ous here as the ego­ma­ni­a­cal genius who keeps hav­ing visions of his Cylon girlfriend/handler in his head. That the man who unwit­tingly helped bring the apoc­a­lypse on is able to be ele­vated to the post of vice pres­i­dent of the for­mer 12 colonies makes for great television.

I love the show. I wait weekly now to see what will hap­pen next. I try not to read on the net what will hap­pen the next episode. I don’t do such a good job of that some­times. The sign of great tele­vi­sion is that you will clamor for more and more like this show does. I want to know who else is a Cylon. I want to know what the colonists will find on Kobol. I want to know how Helo and Star­buck are going to get back to the fleet and what will hap­pen to them on the way. I want to know when Bal­tar will finally turn to the Cylon side and either be forced to flee or will stay and be a Fifth Colum­nist for the Cylons. I want to know what is going to hap­pen to Boomer now that she shot Adama. Will Pres­i­dent Roslin die? Will Bal­tar become pres­i­dent at that time or will he have to cam­paign against Tom Zarek? When is Tigh going to attempt to clean up and get rid of his crazy wife Ellen, who con­se­quently lusts for Tigh to have power? What will hap­pen to Chief when he gets back and his sus­pi­cions about Boomer being a Cylon are realized?

Damn! I love this show!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Television. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.