TV: Battlestar Galactica: miniseries

It was interesting to cut from the end of the run right back to the start, without review of the connective tissue -- particularly the first two full seasons -- where the sketches of characters presented here came to life.  It's helpful to see now, when you can dismiss some of the missteps, knowing which  of the weaker avenues were destined  for abandonment.



Like Caprica, it's a fairly strong pilot. Unpolished but solid, and better with hindsight.

The new series starts establishing its changes right off:


The Cylons were created by man.

Yet in the original, if some of the backstory can be believed, it's not a huge stretch. The Cylons of 1978 had overcome their own organic creators (ok, really, that's a cover for TV standards not wanting to kill sentient, alien race throughout the series) And just perhaps, a God with less than the utmost interest in his followers' well-being played a role...


They were created to make life easier on the Twelve Colonies. Caprica may already be retconning this a little.


And then the day came when the Cylons decided to kill their masters.

That day came forty years ago. War ensued, unifying the Colonies with the creation of the grand Colonial Fleet. When the war ended, the two races went their separate ways, the Cylons absent for four decades. Until now, when blonde, but not exactly "Caprica" model Six arrives at the armistice station for no reason other than to titilate the audience when she catwalks up to the Colonial officer (who apparently flew in alone and has nobody keeping tabs on him or the station) and initiates a makeout until the Basestar outside destroys everyone with a missile attack. I didn't like this scene much the first time I saw it, and it hasn't aged well.  The Colonial representative is unsettled but has no reaction to the Cylons' first appearance at the station. It's just there to grab a casual viewer into watching a few more minutes, but within the story it accomplishes nothing the simple, ominous and mysterious Basestar couldn't.

Next, we join the titular Battlestar, its formal decommissioning already in progress at the end of fifty years' service.  For delivery of introduction and exposition,  future series could do worse than mimic this lengthy sequence of character handoffs as the camera moves through most of the standing Galactica sets.  First up is resident top gun  Kara "Starbuck" Thrace is jogging through the A-shaped, fluorescent-lit corridors.  Kara passes and casually greets Commander William Adama, the Old Man (and nearly-forgotten footnote, Captain Kelly)  introducing them both and establishing their close relationship without specificity.   From there,  the hand-held follows him to Command & Control, or, as it was on the old series, the Bridge.** Then it picks up Lt. Gaeta (filling Omega's role; in the series it rhymes with hey-ya, here everyone but Adama says guy-ta) and introduces us to Colonel Saul Tigh with his most salient trait: a closeup of him emptying a flask into his coffee.

The relay tour ends on the hangar deck with the return of the Old Man,   His deck crew presents him with a retirement gift: the Viper he flew in the first Cylon war, lovingly restored. Olmos is gold in this scene, conveying disbelief, unworthiness, and finally grief when presented with a framed picture from back then; standing by the Viper with his two sons, Lee and Zac. Only Lee survives, estranged.

Ending the walk-and-talks, we cut over to the club for more traditional tv direction, in time for some cards. Kara** is fleecing Helo and Boomer (odd to see all of them together!), but tipsy Tigh overplays his Character Establishment hand by picking a fistfight with Kara, which lands her in the brig, over the objections of the Old Man. Less overt is how everyone else at the table pointedly attempts to ignore the imminent blow-up; it's a good sign of lived-in character building.

Down in Caprica City, we meet the last of our main cast. Secretary of Education Laura Roslin receives her advanced cancer diagnosis, just as she's about to leave for the Galactica retirement ceremony. Gaius Baltar, boy genius and defender of the realm,  conducts a broadcast interview where he laments the government ban on AI research, dating back from the Cylon war.  He is met by the genuine Caprica Six, who's fresh from killing a baby. Yes, we get it, she's eeeevil, in a kind of blank, faux-innocent, I-am-unaware-of-my monstrosity way.

 Also, her spine glows during sex. Why? No human character ever sees it, and we already know she's connected to the Armistice Station attack.   She's been collaborating, unofficially, on his defense ministry work. Because God told her to.  To plant backdoors throughout the Colonial Fleet's navigation-assist program Baltar developed.  Something unpredicted happened: Six fell in love with this weaselly, amoral scientist.  This compels her to unburden her soul about her nature, hints at Cylon resurrection, and her feelings for Gaius, not all in that order. Gaius, however, is more concerned with how his aiding the Cylons will affect him personally... as the nuclear missiles begin to impact.

In space, Lee "Apollo" Adama arrives in his Viper (Mark VII, the silver, kind of streamline Vipers). and is a bit put out that on this old ship, he has to land his ship on manual controls. His palpable disdain for his father is pushed aside for a briefer relay led by the less than perfect landing by Helo and Boomer. The rookie Boomer blames her Raptor's gimbel, leading to a walk-and-shout with Deck Chief Tyrol into privacy where the pair can defy regulations with a secret morning frak.

The attention to Tyrol and Boomer starts illustrating a point of progress marked in Galactica's approach to storytelling.   While naturally the main cast is made of the stock senior officer types -- hotshot pilot, ship commander,  lead mechanic/engineer, like Babylon-5 the rebooted series from the start also made the effort to include those players' support staff; at least a second, often a third and sometimes even a fourth.   Following, we have the meet cute of bridge officer Dualla (taking Rigel's role from the old series), and Laura Roslin's primary aide, Billy Kikeya.   It missteps a little by moving them from quick pass-in-the-corridor eye contact to overwrought shouty match in the Galactica's head, but not so much that it nullifies the good build-out intention of the scene.

A better first meeting is Lee and Kara, who have a realistically awkward you-were-with-my-dead-brother chemistry.  It's both sibling rivalry (Kara's since displaced Lee as Bill's child), and uncomfortable attraction.   As the series progressed, Kara would regularly be called on her bullshit as a means of keeping her plays-by-her-own-rules-hotshot shtick from wandering into self parody; here Lee has the honor of doing it first.

By contrast, the first scene shared by the two Adamas is stiff and awkward in a different way. Bill, staring retirement in the face,  attempts to reach out but Lee has none of it, blaming his father both for Zac's death, and, obliquely, forcing both his sons into the military.  They go their own ways, angry; this scene greatly influences Bill's speech that centers on human failings, responsibility, and regret.   It's a dark speech, and as it mirrors some of Six's lengthy explanation of Cylon dogma, one could be forgiven for thinking Bill might just be a Cylon himself, an accusation Leoben later plays with.

As Roslin and Lee begin their return trip to Caprica, the Galactica receives its first word of the attack.  And we get a full dose of one of the new series' prime assets: EJO, laying out the situation.**  With available pilots but a shortage of Vipers, Bill assigns the museum squadron of Mark IIs to Kara and the other second-stringers left on the ship.  At this stage the story follows events on the Galactica and two other threads:

Between Six's confession and frontline reports, we're well prepared when Galactica's entire fighter group is switched off and then annihilated by a mere two raiders.  The tension and helplessness of the deactivated Vipers' pilots is strongly played, undercut a little by the too-on-the-spot "missile-cam" POV angle we'll see a few more times in the mini-series, but which thankfully is absent from the series.  The question as to why the raptor wasn't shut down and destroyed is on the surface a 'script immunity' moment, but is explained later by Boomer's presence. A second aftereffect of the battle is that Helo and Boomer are forced to land on Caprica and evacuate a few survivors -- Boxey and Baltar most importantly, while Helo nobly elects to stay on the surface. 

On the imminent Colonial One, Laura has taken charge in rendering the ship's assistance to other civilians in the area.  Flying escort still in his father's Mk2, Lee shoots down another POV-cam missile, frying his onboard electronics in the process.    When brought aboard, smarmy PR guy Doral (the  "Kevin Spacey model," rarely seen after the miniseries) tries to enlist Lee as an ally against Laura's pragmatism, but in short order Lee has thrown in on her side.   A later automated government broadcast makes it official: Laura is the highest-ranking survivor of the attack, and she's quickly sworn in as president (echoing LBJ in what's now a cliche of crisis transitions) by her series spiritual adviser,  Elosha. Then the Cylons arrive and nuke Colonial One.  But thanks to Lee's last minute use of Star Trek-level technobabble, they miss.   The ruse is so effective it even fools the Galactica, which assumes Lee has died.

In the first skirmish with Cylon forces, the Galactica's mothball squadron comes out on top, indicating that the Cylon raiders aren't appreciably more capable than their forebears.***  When they launch a three-missile nuclear volley, Kara proves her superiority to Lee by killing two; the third strikes Galactica.  Beyond establishing the new Galactica's capacity for punishment, this sets off a more realistic version of Fire in Space certain to delight fans of the 1978 series: Tigh orders a vacuum venting to snuff the fire.  It kills some maintenance crew, but also the fire, in seconds!

Then it's off to Ragnar Anchorage, a remote Colonial ammunition depot hidden in an atmospheric storm with deleterious effects to Cylon technology.   Transferring the Anchorage's supplies gives a lengthy breather in the war story, allowing the fifty-thousand-odd refugees of the new Ragtag Fugitive Fleet to take stock; never more than when all the lost lambs of the Galactica return home safe: Lee, Roslin, and Sharon.  Even Billy gets in a quick mauling from Dee.

Never a dry eye when Adamas hug it out.

The awkward father-son reconciliation isn't paid immediately, as through a contrived ordinance accident Bill is separated from the supply team and stuck with a Leoben, who's suffering the deleterious effects of the storm.  Quickly sussing out the "skin-job"s origin, we receive a repeat infodump about the Cylons, completely redundant in light of Six's previous session with Baltar. Leoben and Bill then reenact the end of Blade Runner (a film referenced endlessly by co-exec-prod David Eicke) mixing brutal hand-to-hand with comparative philosophy.

And, speaking of Six and Baltar, over on the Galactica,  "Head Six" has been acknowledged.  It's a worn television cliche to make an only-I-can-see-her imaginary friend, and it's applied thickly here.  The series eventually backs off a little as it goes -- or my tolerance for it improves --  but for now it's something of a distraction for the audience as well as our poor Gaius Baltar.  Whatever the origins of Six (and the very eventual "official" explanation for her was not even in the top 5 list at this stage), she works against her own side for Baltar; allowing him to finger Doral as a second Cylon agent and maroon him on Ragnar.

While loading the supplies, Adama and Roslin define their relationship of inverted personality types by arguing the age-old question: fight or flight?  Laura has compelling evidence on her side that the fight is already lost, and they should be moving on with an eye toward continuing as a species.  The military guy wants to fight, but has nothing to fight for.  This exchange reverses both aspects of the 1978 roles: first in that the civilian, not the military, wants to run, and more important, the civilian government has a brain in its head.

Edging from the storm around Ragnar, the Galactica fights a holding action against two Basestars and their complement of fighters while the civilian fleet jumps away, out of Colonial space.  Scripted combat is tricky to balance between story needs and demonstrable capabilities of the forces involved.  This battle, a short delay uninterested in tactical victory, maintains believability.   Once the fleet has won free, Adama delivers a stirring mission statement for the series, which is predicated on a bold lie: that he knows the location of the last Colonial refuge, Earth.

Overcome by the moment, the people -- and, hopefully the audience,  are ready to follow.

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* C&C looks cavernous compared to how it's shot in the series; also the Galactica's fluorescent lights are harsh and exacerbating how young and small everyone looks in comparison to later seasons -- like mice in uniforms.

** Much as Six and Tigh, Kara is played way too broadly in the miniseries. Most especially in this scene, she has a neon sign floating over her reading "SHOCKING REVERSAL OF GENDER ROLES!" while she drinks, fights, and smokes cigars. Oddly, a Lt. "Anders" is her duty replacement once she's jailed. 

*** Nothing can be done for some of the worst exposition in the mini:  "30 Battlestars. "  "That's almost a quarter of the fleet!"  Grr.

**** The Raiders attempt to whammy the Mark II Vipers.  Shouldn't they know which ships would be susceptible?  It seems doubtful that Baltar's code would even be installed on 20-30 year-old hardware, much less be able to run.  Also: no sign of the organic components to the Raiders at this stage.


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Pros: Surprisingly polished on a second go; familiarity with the actors going a long way to appreciating the nuances of their initial work as these characters.

Cons: Expected bad exposition, one horrible piece of Star Trek technobabble, some fluid characterizations.  Typical pilot issues.

Then: C+
Now: B