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Battlestar Galactica Season 2 Premiere
fanblade writes "As if slashdotters needed another reason to stay home on a Friday night, the 20-episode second season of Battlestar Galactica premieres tonight at 10/9C on the Sci Fi Channel. The series, a 're-imagining' of the original 1978 TV series by the same name, made history as the highest-rated original Sci Fi Channel program ever. The first episode of the second season, 'Scattered', won't be televised in the UK until October, but I seriously doubt that will be a problem for the show that 'killed broadcast TV'. There's also excellent coverage on Wikipedia for those eager to brush up or catch up on the first season."
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
"Starbuck is supposed to be a womanizing man, not a womanizing woman!
Atlantis is much better if you don't have to sit through all the dreadful acting. You can usually cut out half a show or more and still get the general idea of what happened.
I'm waiting till about season 3, if the crew hasn't gelled by then it will be off my list completely.
Sean
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Also, don't forget the Podcast of commentary that is available for the episode.
It's almost like they want us to download the torrent instead of tuning it to watch.
I generally agree your point about rehashing old shows into todays fodder, and not just scifi. Movies can't seem to come up with anything new either.
BUT (huge but)
This show is the exception. After watching this, seeing the old show would be like watching a disney version of "A Clockwork Orange". The new BSG is so much more than the old show. I'm sorry, Glen Larsen had great ideas, but the production never lived up. This is how the show should have been done from the beginning! Dramatic, epic, lots of intrigue and suspense.
And I don't think Dr. Who is a remake. More of a continuation. There have been, like, a bajillion of those guys. I think the BBC just took it out of mothballs and brushed it off. Kinda like what "Enterprise" was to "Star Trek".
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
That night in 1978 that Battlestar Glactica premired, they were showing the movie King Kong on another network. It was a very big night for tv when I was kid. But then disaster struck:
They interrupted both shows because Isreal and Egypt were signing a peace agreement. And my mom sent me to bed.
Egypt and Isreal had been fighting for hundreds of years... couldn't they have waited one more day? Think of the children.
don't know what I will do without Richard Dean Anderson's (Jack O'Neil) comedy :-(
It's O'Neill. Two L's.
One thing I really like about BSG is that the weapons are realistic and the visual effects are outstanding. The missile salvos are really really cool. Unlike Star Trek, Star Wars and SG-1, the BSG folks use guided weapons. In those other shows, in the future, the engineers have forgotten how to make guided or tracking weapons. They just shoot stuff randomly and most of the time they miss. The Stargate Atlantis finale from last season was a prime example. The marines show up with 'rail guns' that they are so fracking proud of. But then they just spray out into space with no radar tracking or anything else, hitting nothing. Jesus, a 20th century Phalanx is way better than the crap they have.
Oh, Babylon 5 was one of the few good ones also. The way they tracked the beam weapons and sliced things up was believable and cool.
I actually prefer it this way.
I've watched some Stargate Atlantis, but could never stick with it. There's no moral ambiguity in the show; the main character, the Colonel, responds to everything with a clear-cut moral choice. Everything has to be done based on principle - no compromise with reality, and it always seems to work out in their favor.
Battlestar Galactica portrays things in a much more "gray" way, forcing characters to make terrible choices where there's no morally superior answer (i.e. in "33" when they blow up the Olympic Carrier). This, mixed in with the Cylons looking like humans, feeling like humans, makes the entire of the show even more amigious, which is what sets it apart from most of the other shows on TV. There's no clear cut enemy - no clear "us" and "them," and thus, much more realistic. Even with the advanced technology/sci-fi nature of the show, it manages to portray human behavior/moral dilemmas much more realistically than the mainstream shows set in the present time on Earth.
I'll paraphrase a quote I heard from somewhere, "I'd rather watch plausible human behavior in an implausible setting than watch implausible human behavior in a plausible setting."