What's the charge this time?
Striking a superior asshole.

A few years ago the Sci Fi channel remade the classic series Battlestar Gallactica as a miniseries. Then this year they've continued the story as a regular TV series. I've never seen the classic series from the 70's and I missed the miniseries when it played. But I did start watching the new TV show when it started this year.

I enjoyed it, and there was some background story I didn't really understand. So I had NetFlix send me the DVD of the miniseries and watched it. The feel of the miniseries is just the same as the TV series, which was kind of strange. Instead of watching a three hour movie, it was like watching three TV episodes back to back.

Overall I think what they're doing with the series is quite interesting. In the sci-fi space the theme is familiar - human race decimated by our own creation (robots in this case.) There are some original pieces though. The idea that the entirety of humanity is just who happened to be out in a spaceship when the attacks happened is neat, and it gives them lots of good plot points since now everyone has to survive on ships that are designed to have a support system back home, but now there's not system. Other interesting pieces are robots that not just look like people, but are integrated into the population as sleeper agents that don't even know they're robots.

I think the series premier, 33, is the most intriguing so far and was a great hour of TV. When this series comes out of DVD I recommned watching at least that episode to see if grabs you.

Recent episodes have made me worry a bit about the overall direction of the show. The whole plot with Dr Baltar having visios of his past cylon lover and their talks about God have been interesting, but are starting to both overwhelm the show and drag a little. Also, they've started doing a bit of destiny, spiritual stuff which can always go bad. Sci-Fi often falls into this trap of mysticism which sits on top of the technology. The trouble is you can explain technology through normal advances but it takes a lot more work to make mysticism work and be explained.

Now you don't have to always explain mystecism. Sometimes you can just allow it to exist as part of the world space. But to do that the mysticism needs to be a core piece of the world. With Battlestar Gallactica the story started out having very little mysticism, but now is being slowly revealed. This makes it a mystery and feels inconsistent with the rest of the world set up - and makes us as an audience want them to explain what's going on.

Compare that to The Matrix and the original Star Wars movies. There is a healthy amount of mysticism in both of those, but it's set up as just a piece of the world. The audience accepts it because the mysticism is a core peice of the fabricated world. The reason science ficiton and fantasy is so cool is the creators get to make up a world for their story, but they only get to sell the audience on their new world once. They create a baseline with the initial sell and the audience will buy it - but then if they change the rules the audience expects an explaination for the changes.

But even those movies that set up the mysticism from the start are still prone to messing it all up by trying to explain it. Just look at the second two Matrix movies and the Star Wars prequels. In both they took the mysticism that audiences accepted in the originals and tried to explain it all - to very poor effect.

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