A complete archive of The Medium is Not Enough’s reviews of TV programmes since 2005
US TV
Review: Battlestar Galactica 3.1-3.2
In the US: SciFi, Fridays, 9/8c
In the UK: Sky One later in the year/start of next year.
Characters re-cast: 0
Major characters gotten rid of: 1-3, but I started to lose count
Major new characters: 0
Format change percentage: 90%
Pies eaten: All of them
The Battlestar Galactica of the late 70s/early 80s was a simple affair. Loosely based on the Book of Mormon, it featured a bunch of humans living on “the 12 colonies” who create a race of robots, the cylons, to do their bidding. The robots turn, there’s a war, and almost all the humans are killed. The survivors huddle together in a few ships guarded by the last “battlestar”, a kind of spaceship version of an aircraft carrier, and this “ragtag armada”, as it was called in the opening narration, heads off to look for the 13th colony, Earth.
Each week, the cylons would catch up with them, there’d be a fight and the armada would escape, typically then finding some kind of Old West-styled planet or casino that had a disco. Formulaic but fun.
SciFi’s remake of Battlestar Galactica has been running for three seasons now and has continually shifted upwards the quality bar for science fiction on television. The cheesiness has gone, replaced instead with the bleakness of a group of 40,000 people on the run from an unrelenting enemy that used nuclear weapons to destroy 16 billion of their friends, families and neighbours and seems to want to do the same to them.
The producers haven’t been afraid to tinker with the format either. The new cylons create human-looking, biological versions of themselves that believe in a single God, while those pesky humans continue to worship Athena and Apollo. A second battlestar, the Pegasus, turns out to have survived, making the entire name of the show slightly redundant; and at the end of the second season, the armada finds a planet capable of supporting life, so decides to stop running and settle down. Then, for a last format tinker, the producers posed the question, “What if the cylons caught up with the fleet while their guards were down?” and left us waiting all summer for the answer.
