What makes battlestar galactica good

And that's because it's not merely great science fiction — it's great TV. While most sci-fi — whether on TV, in movies or books — remains aimed toward science geeks or overgrown adolescents, producer Ronald Moore and the Sci-Fi Channel have essentially reinvented the genre by giving it an edgy, current, broad-based appeal. The show lived but one and a half seasons, but earned a hard-core following that has lobbied for the series to return. Many of those fans aren't exactly pleased with the remake they've gotten, which shares some commonality with the original in terms of premise and characters, but whose sensibility is Moby compared to the original's Bee Gees.

The premise of both Galactica series goes something like this: An arm of humanity has settled 12 planets — called colonies, each named for a sign of the Zodiac — in a distant star system, and fought a long war with a race of murderous robots called Cylons. The first twist in the remake is that humans created the Cylons, who have returned the favor by rebelling and going to war against their former masters.

The second twist, which emerges as the new series begins, is that the Cylons — originally metallic hulks often referred to as "walking toasters" — have re-created themselves in the form of their creators and now "look and feel human.

Indeed, some are sleeper agents who don't even know they're Cylon. She is thus able to penetrate the Twelve Colonies' defense mainframe that Baltar has programmed and enable a sneak Cylon attack that devastates both the colonies and their protective space fleet.

All that's left is the aging Battlestar Galactica , whose stony but troubled Cmdr. William Adama Edward James Olmos refused to let the spaceship be equipped with networked computers. Here the similarities end though; the Cylons that destroyed the colonies weren't crated by aliens; they were created by humanity and rebelled against their masters.

As well as the familiar Centurions we soon learn that there are some Cylons that can't be distinguished from people and some of those don't even realise they are Cylons. As humanity flees they will have to struggle against both Cylons and themselves if they are to survive and find their new home. I really enjoyed this series; the story may have been familiar but the characters were much deeper than in the version I saw as a child and there wasn't the feeling that if a character was a regular they would inevitably survive; in fact many major characters die including some that manage to survive for several seasons.

Fans of the original series will be pleased to see Richard 'Apollo' Hatch return; this time his character, Tom Zarek, is far from heroic. I don't usually think to comment on the music for a series but here I must as composer Bear McCreary did such a fine job and later on some of the music is actually integral to the plot. As with all series there are some weaker episodes but even the poor Galactica episodes are better than much of what is on television.

When the series finished I was left wanting more but all the key story threads had been tied up and it was good that it ended while it was still good rather than overstaying its welcome. If you haven't seen this series yet I strongly recommend it; just remember to watch the miniseries before series one as that sets up the whole story.

KineticSeoul 12 May So my friend tried to get me into this show and for the most part, I am glad he did. This show was like a less nihilistic, bleak and hopeless sci-fi version of "Game of Thrones" in my opinion. While having space wars, it deals with philosophy, theology, ex machina, motives and ideals. While the peoples have to deal with seeking peace, spirituality, inner longing and desires while dealing with their own mortality.

The story does get a bit more complex as the show goes on, when the line starts to get less binary. And you start to see things from different perspectives and what makes each of the character tick. I didn't particularly like most of the characters and they switched from being likable to being way too dramatic, pretentious and annoying.

But then there are episodes that make those characters shine and brings out the parts of heroic selflessness while also standing their ground. So after finishing the show I thought about it a bit and I thought that is what makes them human. Because not everyone can be completely likable percent of the time.

But when it comes time to step up to the plate, the ones that has at least some integrity will step up. The CGI is a bit outdated, but the space battles really isn't the core of the show or the most interesting parts when it comes to the story. I would still like to see a similar version of this show except with mechs.

The show does get a bit repetitive and really starts to feel like it's dragging after few episodes into the 3rd season. However near the end of the 4th season, it did well done job of trying to wrap everything up. I even liked the ending, because despite it being a beloved show by many they didn't try to wrap things up in a neat little box.

But still gave a sense that there is still hope And I liked that. Overall, this is a pretty darn good sci-fi space opera that is worth digging into. Collapsed world chaos-rampant 5 January I'll preface this by saying I gave up on this roughly halfway into the second season. This means I'm giving an opinion on - by most accounts - the much better half of the show as apparently it plummets in the third. Take that for what you will.

Certainly it can't be that season 2 ends at the height of inspiration and season 3 inexplicably opens with everything done wrong, there must be a progression. So anyway I was a fan of the mini-series. Not for any plot with Cyclons or religious undertones, but for the fact it opens in a tangible future, an ordinary day in that life, and stretches that life through a series of more or less credible seeming anchors.

It didn't even have to be the end of humankind, I'd much rather if it wasn't, but there you have it. It had a sense of world and horizon, and hit home because we had that narrowing of horizon until we were left with a bunch of ships adrift in space and all time ahead.

This picks up after that. And does everything wrong. Significant fault lies with the TV series format. The mini-series is a different thing altogether. It is cinematic, it is one film paused in so many spots and conceived as one from the start. TV series are a long- term project, usually with a more or less defined horizon but indeterminable middle subject to a million factors that have nothing to do with what we come to see, the cinematic craft.

The main thing to note in tandem with my other comments is how this changes narrative time. Every episode more or less has to have resolution. Every episode has to offer its crisis of the week then to the next one. Each one is filled to the brim with catastrophic event and huge moral conundrum: do this or that, force or let.

Certainly a situation like we have here would be filled with those, no? But that's not the point, what 'objectively' might happen. It's your choice as a filmmaker to decide just which moments strung together best convey the feel not the fact of what it means to be there. Here we have constant politicking and crisis-solving, but no visual recollection, no one is ever seen staring out of a window at space itself..

So here's the choice you have to make with a thing like this: you either let us soak the gravity of the situation by placing us in the middle of shifting machinery of fate that create it, or you have us wander about, this time fighting for water, the next fuel, then looking for the Arrow of Athena which opens her tomb in Kobol which the old stories say points the way to Earth.

That this is praised as a grown-ups fiction makes me shake my head. Surely being a 'grown-up' entails more than getting ourselves caught in moralities about pecking order. The less said about the whole business about what it means to be human, can a robot love, and following vision as god, the better. Silly in the extreme. It leads nowhere except in mythologizing, politicking for the mind instead of introspection. This series is much better than the original. It has a lot of effort and thought put into it.

It never feels cheap or cheesy. The tone is rather serious and I appreciated that. The action and designs are also good. The story started off engaging but I lost interest after a while. Ed-Shullivan 30 January If it wasn't for Mrs. Shullivan who insisted we binge watch the Blu Ray version of all four 4 seasons and the entire 74 grueling and painful episodes I would have given up on the series halfway through season 2.

Not only did we watch the entire four 4 seasons but we also watched the extended version of the two 2 other stand alone movies, namely, "Razor" after season 3 and after season 4 we watched "The Plan. The never ending speeches of ALL the cast members.

There were too many to count but trust me, these endless speeches comprised 20 percent of the entire series which I considered "FILLERS" that the screenplay writer, director, and editor agreed on for the final yet still overbearing final version.

Each episodes opening and closing musical score with that irritating religious themed background. Sticking with how much I hated the musical score was the constant boom drum banging to warn us something bad was about to happen. The battles in the universe between the Cylons and the Battlestar Galactica crew were boring as if they were battling in hell and not in the heavens.

I can't think of one character that I grew to like. They were always fighting with one another. What I liked about the series: 1. Mary McDonnell's gorgeous hair and her great smile. When the series came to a final ending as my pain and suffering was over. I love my wife , but if there ever was another re-boot I would seriously think about finding a temporary place to stay until she told me she has finished watching it.

The pain. I give the series a 2 out of 10 IMDB rating. And yes Mrs. Shullivan and I binged watch the entire series so I do know what I am talking about. I can understand the initial backlash against Starbuck, it seemed like an unneeded change in a reboot that might be full of unneeded changes that could take away from the original in the same way that "V" would.

Only the reboot turned out to be legendary and though I feel appropriately dirty saying it--for love of the but Starbuck turned out to be so much better than the clean ladies man. She was tough and grungy and awesome in the vein of the top shelf sci-fi heroes. And now there is a new political backlash, years later, that seems to hate for the reasons of destroying anything that has a nerd following and I don't understand the need for that. Anyway, leave that political junk at the door, sit down, and bing a series that is as beautiful as it is emotional and adventurous.

It marks a high point for everything epically great that science fiction can be. I don't know of any other sci-fi series that polarized its viewer's opinion the way this show did, and when I looked at the bonus material on the DVD, I could now see why Ron Moore was so stressing its virtues, because comments in the bonus material was a direct rebuttal to the criticisms that was going around on the internet.

First of all, let me tell you that I had nothing against this series or Ron Moore when the series started. This series sends negative message to the audiences who may still be at their young and impressionable age.

Other characters are also on and off hostile overtly or covertly. People who may turn against you on a dime are depicted as the "norm" in this series. I don't want to live in a society where people would have an idea that such society is a normal society. This BSG series is filled with these unhealthy paradigms.

The visual tone is rehash of all the "darker" Sci-Fi fantasies of the '90s, but what Ron Moore has missed was that in the s, the mood is lightening up much more, and this reliance on "darkness" as he was proudly saying in the DVD bonus material "It is darker. It is more story driven. Take "Batman Returns" for instance. The visuals of the Gotham City is dark and gloomy, but the people in the story have more optimistic outlook, and are genuinely trying to make matters better, which gives hope that even in a dump there's hope if there are few good people like this.

I don't want our youth and adults to think that if they acted "angry" and "troubled" people around them will see them as serious, and important person, but this program is filled with this kind of innuendos.

In the real society, such people are just "unhappy" people who also makes other people unhappy, and I hope television shows which are viewed by its audience almost uncensored would stop depicting such characters as "heros".

My opinion is ditto for the plot. If it's filled with people in trouble, then somehow it's a "story driven" plot line. Other unspeakable inconsistencies of just making things look like they're from antique auction have been mentioned by number of reviewers here, so I won't go into them, but I am against the philosophy of just making things look "ugly or old " and equating that as being more realistic.

The original BSG at least had quality that didn't just make things more ugly and call it realism. It might have been cheesy by today's standard, but they did take a poke at the best vision of the future that they could have at the time and presented it to the TV audience.

I know that people who saw it the first time was awed by its visual effects. I can't say the same for this BSG series. Everything is a borrowed idea from somewhere, and it tries to say that it's more realistic by making things uglier.

It gets a C- for originality. I think many of the people who had negative opinions about this show have also sensed the unhealthy undercurrent of this show. I hope that Sci-Fi channel and all future sci-fi series producers will take a serious look at this and try to produce a genuinely original product that is of their own idea and effort which really does convey original message to its audience.

It makes you wonder doesn't it? It's now , 5 years since I've wrote the original comment, and I could say that I was right about my original assessment that these guys had no originality, from the course that the series seems have taken after season 2 - it just fizzled and fell apart as far as I can tell. My conclusion that I wrote 5 years ago still stands: I hope that Sci-Fi channel and all future sci-fi series producers will take a serious look at this and try to produce a genuinely original product that is of their own idea and effort which really does convey original message to its audience.

Simply brilliant drama, not just sci-fi runamokprods 9 November One of my favorite television series of all time along with 'The Wire' and 'Breaking Bad'. Like 'The Wire' this is a complex, Dickensian study of human nature, not afraid of asking big questions, and meticulously plotted like a great novel, so that each episode is a chapter in a much larger whole.

This is thinking person's sci fi, in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke, or Isaac Asimov. It's about why we are how we are, what it means to be a human being, morality under constant pressure in times of war, fathers and sons, impossible loves, metaphors for modern and recent politics and real world situations.

My wife, far from a sci-fi fan was hooked after 3 episodes, and we tore through 5 years of shows in just a few days. It's that addicting. The acting is all at least quite good, and some cast members are remarkable, creating characters full of depth, complexity and contradiction.

The writing is terrific, allowing the characters to change and grow, but always in ways that make sense, creating seemingly inexplicable conundrums, only to find surprising, sometimes shocking — but ultimately logical and satisfying - ways to explain where they've taken us.

The special effects are generally very impressive for TV, even if they're not really why you watch this show. It also has some of the most tense episodes of television I've ever seen, and some of the season enders left me completely wrung out and blown away. I was sad to get to the last episode, just as one is sad to finish a great book. Speaking of ending, the one serious let down for me was the very last episode. Certainly no disaster, but for perhaps the only time in the series, some of the answers felt disappointingly flat and simplistic.

But that wasn't enough to take away from the tremendous esteem with which I hold the show. One that is surely worth your time. XweAponX 9 March Ronald D Moore had just finished 7 years writing Deep Space 9, after a few years of writing some of the greatest episodes of Star Trek: Next Generation. But this was his show. His and Glen Larson's, however much Glen actually participated in this creation.

One thing Ron knows how to do is tell a human based tale about war. And Ron was the best person to do it. As such, Moore kept all of the elements, of the Caprican Government, the 12 tribes, the Lost tribe, and the Cylons. The look of the Battlestar was not the magnificently clean and polished one from , we really got to see how repeated battle damage would affect even the most powerful battleship, when there is no Drydock available.

And to keep losing people and ships, the show starts with survivors, and this census keeps getting smaller as the show goes on.

But what this remake does is not paint bad guys black and good guys white, or Cylons silver even. Gaius Balthar is not the same evil crook played by "Kor" John Calicos , here, he is played by the much more complex James Callis, and in a nod to Deep Space 9, the character reminds you of Dr. Julian Subatoy Bashir. From Deep Space 9. They even share similar characteristics, In DS9, Bashir was revealed to be a genetically improved human, like Khan.

In BSG, Balthar is proved to be very intelligent, he thinks of himself as special, where Bashir has been made special. Hands down. Tags: battlestar galactica , best tv show , sci-fi. I get only Season 1. What did you make of the last season specifically Daybreak Part 3 and the Epilogue? I thought it was cop-out after 4 seasons of mostly brilliant writing. There are so many holes and unresolved issues that it cheapens the series for me.

Ignoring all the supernatural elements revealed including obnoxious angles and a ghostly fighter pilot, there were subjects that were simply not believable. The whole notion that pre-earth humanity would abandon all technology, to break the cycle, to start all over again? For pre-Earth humans to universally leave everything just to wrap the show in a neat bow really breaks the meme of the series, that was things are rarely black and white, right or wrong.

I was taken back as well with the idea that humans would be so inclined to give up modern comforts to start over but the more I thought about it, it kinda makes sense to start over from scratch to break the pattern of violence due to our reliance on technology.

You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Email Address:. The answer is never simple or black and white and BSG is not afraid to tackle these issues.

Faith, God and spirituality: One of the basis of war between cylons and humans is their different views of God and faith. Like this: Like Loading Comments 4 Comments Categories Uncategorized. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. March 5, - November 7, Follow Blog via Email Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.