The Last Word: “Battlestar Galactica”

I’m not going to be too long-winded here: if you’ve been following this blog you already know my general feelings about the series. The series pilot, “Saga of a Star World” just sort of set a negative tone that took half the season to recover from, and by that time most everyone had tuned out (excepting the show’s letter-writing fan base). Add to that clinky-clunky Cylon villains about as formidable as wind-up toy robots, repetitive video-game-style scenes of outer space dogfights between ships, and plotlines recycled from Westerns. war movies and abstract mythology and you get a major disappointment. Only toward the end of the season do we get some relief from this snooze-fast, when more personalized, character-based stories started to emerge.

But my **1/2 star rating (out of four) also includes Galactica 1980, which was a surprise delight for me, thanks primarily to the more simplified, down-to-Earth (pun intended) storylines and campy, whether intentional or not, tone. Two alien dudes, sans any kind of personality and not even trying, travelling via flying motorcycles and turning invisible whenever the need be, are infinitely more entertaining than miles and miles of technospeak and contrived visits to Earth-like planets while trying to get to Earth itself. Averaged out, the rating for both series, along with the pilot as theatrical release, is, as I mentioned, **1/2 stars: not terribly shabby methinks. Of course, it maintained such a cult following for so long after that they rebooted the show in 2004 for the Sci-Fi channel. That, I can assure you, will never get the honor of my keystrokes as I never recognized the turn of the millennium. At least on this blog.

Series Rating:  **1/2