New Killer Star

On the one hand, the original Battlestar Galactica was a huge part of my adolescent TV watching habits. On the other, I barely remember a thing about it, as I was about eight years old. So, when the Sci-Fi channel remade the show into a four-hour miniseries, I was pretty much the perfect audience. I remember the show fondly, but don't really recall anything specifically enough to be offended by creative liberties and changes.

The strategy worked. Names are the same, but nearly everything else has been modified. Starbuck is a chick, but seeing as how Starbuck was Dirk Benedict pre-A Team, that's not so much of a problem. Even though I just got done saying I didn't hang on to much memory of the old show, I have a vague notion that it was awfully male-centric given that it was the late seventies.

Also, Cylons are now hot blonde supermodels. Works for me. Actually, Cylons apparently were some random alien race in the old show, but here, they're basically artificially intelligent machines who revolted against their human creators by exploiting other non-intelligent machines to their advantage. I saw someone somewhere say that this was a factor in the original, but that sounds totally new to me. Anyway, they were the big clunky metal centurions in some war forty years before the miniseries gets going, and maybe explained in the first couple minutes that aired before the hour mark (at least for the second airing). Now they're much more advanced, and sneaky to boot. And they seem to have found religion. If this is the reason they turned against man, that's actually pretty cool.

Overall, the story worked. The presentation looked an awful lot like Babylon 5 at times, but I could live with it. And the space battle scenes were done really, really well, with the vacuum-induced silence and no lasers to speak of. The way it ended, the door is left wide-open for either more TV movies or a new series, and the ratings, from what I hear, could justify either.