Thursday, August 20, 2009

Battlestar Gallactica



I’ve been watching Battlestar Gallactica on Netflix the last months. I watched all four seasons. Here’s my thoughts on it.

First, I this kind of show needs to be seen on DVD’s because it is really one huge extended movie umpteen hours long busted up into episodes. Which makes me wonder why they didn’t save the original director’s cuts and just use them for the DVD’s? The commentary continually refers to the problem that important scenes were cut in order to fit into the timeslots for television. It seems a simple matter to save the original uncut versions and just transfer those to DVD. It would also make the DVD sets more marketable to those who have seen the shows originally on tv.

Second, the creators went in big for surprise twists. The trouble is that not all the plot points resolved the hanging threads created by the surprise twists. The resolutions that were given were of an ad-hoc nature. The creator’s commentaries admitted that they gave plot twists that created long range plotting problems and postponed thinking about the resolutions to those problems until later. For example, Kara’s resurrection was never fully explained.

Third, one wonders what the Cylons were about, whether they had a plan or not. They went through a lot of trouble to destroy the remnants of the human race in Adama’s rag-tag fleet through 4 years and who knows how many light-years distance, while doing precious little to create their own civilization in the meantime. The show bases the Cylon behavior on the need for human sperm for reproduction. They have ships that can travel the galaxy but they can’t get sperm banks?

But I dwell on the negative. The positives of this series far outweighs those. The story holds up. Some of those plot problem resolutions were pretty ingenious. I really got interested in the characters.

My favorite episodes were those on the occupation and escape from New Caprica.

I recommend this series. If you wish, you can rent the videos like I did (Netflix) or buy them from somewhere like Amazon:
Battlestar Gallactica 1, 2.0, 2.5

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