"When the captain's son gets vaporized, you just know that you're not getting the whole story... The audience knows that no kid is ever going to die on Doctor Who."
-Me, reviewing Curse of the Black Spot
When I wrote those words, I had no idea that the very next piece of science-fiction I watched would not only kill a child, but would also feature a character committing infanticide.
Battlestar Galactica was originated back in 1978 as the very first Star Wars ripoff, and the very first television show to cost a million dollars an episode. Guess which one got it cancelled. After 25 years and at least one aborted attempt, it was brought back by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. Unlike Doctor Who, the revived BSG was a complete reimagining, re-casting every role and re-telling the entire story, with significant changes. An extremely long miniseries - basically a made-for-TV movie split into two parts - acted as a pilot for an actual show, which quickly followed.
The story begins with some background information that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Terminator or The Matrix, and visual effects that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Firefly. The Cylons were created by man, then they fought them, then there was a peace. An armistice station was built, but the Cylons never bother to show up. Until one day they do, in the form of two glorified toasters and one incarnation of sex. And then they blow up the station.
Cut to the eponymous Galactica, which is about to be decomissioned. In the course of one four-minute-long shot, we rove a bunch of corridors and are introduced to ace-pilot-with-an-additude-problem Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh, and a bunch of bridge officers. Sorry, "CIC Officers." Galactica doesn't have a Star Trek- style bridge, but rather an aircraft-carrier-style Combat Information Center that functions as the ship's nerve center. There's no Captain's Chair, no viewscreen, and no ship's computer voiced by the creator's wife.
Down in the hangar bay, we meet two more really important characters, Tyrol and Boomer. Tyrol's Galactica's crew chief, and Boomer is a pilot. They're fraternizing. We also meet two slightly-less-major characters, Helo and Cally. Helo is Boomer's ECO, and Cally is another mechanic. Neither gets much to do now, but they'll both be important later on. The Miniseries has to introduce an imperial ton of characters, and for the most part it suceeds at getting their roles and personalities across in just a few lines of dialogue. Somewhere in the background we also meet a character named Prosna, but damn if I actually remembered who he was.
Cut to Planet Caprica. Sex incarnate wanders around a market and kills an infant by snapping its neck. Okay, that description doesn't quite do the scene justice. The last time we saw this woman, she was getting herself blown up on a space station, and now she's wandering around, apparently looking a bit confused. She mentions, somewhat amazed, that the infant's neck is capable of supporting its head. After the deed is done, she looks distressed. What was she doing? Examining human frailties? Experiencing death firsthand? She doesn't act like a serial baby-killer, and that's probably why I didn't have too much of a problem with that scene. Or maybe I'm just a sociopath.
Starbuck, Boomer, Helo, Tigh, and the Galactica's CAG play a card game. When Starbuck wins, Tigh knocks the table over and Starbuck punches him. This was one of two scenes in the miniseries that I didn't really get the first time; in retrospect, the scene's trying to tell us that Tigh's a drunk who is estranged from his wife, and Starbuck likes riling him up, even though she's on a hair trigger herself.
Back on Caprica, we meet Dr. Gaius Baltar, the Smartest Man Alive, played by an actor who looks uncannily like DS9's Dr. Julian Bashir (who just happened to be the Smartest Man Alive in that show). Sex incarnate walks in; they get it on and her spine starts to glow. As if we didn't know this woman was in no way normal. It eventually transpires that she is both a robot and a woman, a Cylon called Number Six (yes, they picked the number as a reference to that Number Six, and yes, I'll be calling her Number Sex from time to time). She's been using Baltar to gain access to Caprica's defense mainframe. She eventually tells him this, along with the fact that a Cylon attack is about to go down. But for some reason she seems rather interested in ensuring his survival. In the commentary, the producers mention that Tricia Helfer had virtually no acting experience prior to this, and it later transpires that they were writing the Cylon plan by the seat of their pants. I wonder which contributed more to Six's strange behavior. No, I'm not knocking her acting ability here; in fact I'm impressed that an inexperienced actress delivered such a good performance for a character whose motivation was apparently unknown even to her at the time.
Starbuck gets thrown in the brig for striking a superior officer. Adama's son, Lee, turns up for the Galactica's decomissioning ceremony. Unlike virtually everyone else, Lee (call sign: Apollo), doesn't have a lot of respect for the old man. At first I figured that this was just because he didn't like always being compared to Commander Adama, which brings us directly to the second scene in the miniseries that I'm ashamed to say I completely missed the point of. Lee visits Starbuck in the brig; it's been two years since "the funeral," and Starbuck and Adama still talk about it two or three times a year. We've already seen that Starbuck and Adama have a special relationship going on, and it's in this scene that we actually learn it, as well as why Lee has such a big stick up his ass when it comes to his father. Lee's brother Zak died two years ago; he and Starbuck were an item. After the accident, Adama treated Starbuck like a daughter. This isn't made explicit in this scene, but it's pretty obviously inferred. I was just being oblivious or something when I saw it the first time. Shame on me.
Lee visits the Commander and has an argument about how his brother wasn't cut out to be a pilot; he's upset because Adama pushed Zak too hard to do something he couldn't do, and that's what led to Zak's death. Lee is additionally saddled with having to fly his father's Viper during the decommissioning ceremony - as if he needs more baggage.
We meet Secretary of Education Laura Roslin, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. It's not the Venusian Flu, it's cancer. This is just one example of the realism in this series compared to other sci-fi shows. (As an aside, you can see a Firefly-class ship at the very beginning of her first scene.) She travels to Galactica to try to get it set up to be a museum, but Adama won't abide networked computers. (Not going to be an issue, really, unless Adama's going to continue to command Galactica after it becomes a museum.)
The decomissioning ceremony goes smoothy, although Adama ad-libs his speech and winds up confessing his sadness about the loss of his son. Roslin's ship leaves to head back to Caprica.
And now that every single character has finally been introduced, everything goes to hell. The Cylons attack; Galactica's CAG is killed, along with most of the Viper pilots. Boomer and Helo make an emergency landing on Caprica, where they're accosted by refugees. Their ship is fixed, but Helo gives up his seat to Dr. Baltar.
Baltar will spend the rest of the miniseries hallucinating about Six and trying desperately to save his own ass; he's the one who (unwittingly) gave the Cylons everything they needed to wipe out humanity. He gets trapped in a web of his own lies and winds up getting an apparently innocent man marooned just to save his own hide. It's all very interesting to watch, and there are moments during his epic speed lying that he actually seems to channel the Doctor - but that could just be me, since this was just before Doctor Who came back, and none of the Original Seven were quite that manic.
Here's the thing; up to this point, we have two protagonists that it's hard to like; Apollo has a massive stick up his ass and Baltar's a cowardly liar. The main protagonist, Adama, hasn't really done that much to deserve all the praise the other characters heap on him. Yes, he's a father to his men and all that, but at this point he's also an emotionally scarred man who's apparently partly responsible for his son's death. Tigh's a drunk, and Starbuck has a serious attitude problem. Six is evil (and relegated to being a hallucination of the aforementioned cowardly liar for the rest of the miniseries and most of the first batch of episodes). Of the main characters, only Roslin would appear to be completely likeable on paper, and even she comes across as a meddling bureaucrat in her conversation with Adama (whereas he comes off as a Luddite). And yet it's hard not to keep watching. That's because, with the possible exception of Baltar, none of these characters are actually unlikeable; they're all flawed people. They're not perfect Starfleet folk. And despite their flaws, we care about them.
(Sidebar: I listed Tigh as a main character and didn't mention Boomer, even though Grace Park appears in the main credits and Michael Hogan is listed as a guest star once we get to the series proper. Boomer's role in this story is pretty much simply to get Baltar onto the Galactica. That's about it. She's having a relationship with the crew chief, but her character doesn't seem to be nearly as fleshed out as Tigh's. Again, that's nothing against the actress; there's just not that much to her character yet. The only reason I can think of why she gets star billing is the fact that she's revealed to be a Cylon at the end.)
Roslin gets word of the Cylon attack and commandeers the passenger ship she's on. She starts rescuing stranded civilians, but her "I'm in charge" attitude annoys a reporter, who tries to get Apollo (who was along to escort them) to put her in her place. The first scene between Apollo and Roslin is awesome; you think Apollo's going to shut this upstart bureaucrat down, but he very quickly realizes that "the lady's in charge." This is the scene where I started warming up to Apollo, and I think that this was a deliberate choice on the part of the writers. They're setting up the Roslin-Adama conflict. Roslin brings out the good in Apollo; she's a leader he can look up to and respect, whereas all he can see when he looks at his father is the accident that cost him a brother.
A Cylon attack on Galactica gets Starbuck out of the brig and forces Tigh to vent part of the ship, killing 85 people on Tyrol's crew in order to save the ship. This is where Prosna dies, and Tyrol and Cally duly mourn him, but because he had so little screen time before this, I kind of forgot who he was. This is the first of two tough decisions in the miniseries, and, like the second one, it's nice to get to see some of the consequences of that decision. It also explains why Adama keeps Tigh around; from a purely storytelling standpoint, Adama can't be the father-to-his-men-type figure if he personally makes these kinds of decisions. Instead, he lets Tigh make the call and then stands by him on it.
With all 42 (!) people ahead of her in the line of sucession dead, Roslin becomes President of
what little is left. Meanwhile, everyone ahead of Adama in the military chain of command is also dead, so he takes command of the military. He orders everyone to rendezvous with him. Roslin then orders him to rendezvous with her. "Ask him how many hospital beds he has available and how soon he can join us." Again, we never saw this sort of military-civilian conflict even on Deep Space Nine.
Adama and Apollo bitch at each other over the radio (sorry, "wireless"). Adama refuses to accept Roslin's authority, insisting that she's just the Secretary of Education. Apollo refuses to rendezvous with Galactica. The whole thing is rendered moot when two Cylon raiders appear. Adama desperately yells for his son to get out of there, but the civilian ships are apparently destroyed.
What surprised me the most about Part 1 of the miniseries was how little of the Cylon attack we actually saw. We saw a couple of nukes go off on Caprica, and we saw one fighter squadron get wiped out. Most of the rest of it was relayed to Galactica's CIC, in much the same way that the first half of the Borg battle in Star Trek: First Contact is heard but not seen. I applaud this decision; not only did it save considerably on the budget, but it gave us more time for character... well, it's too early to say "development," so let's say "exploration" instead.
It's interesting to watch this unfold from Adama's perspective, even though what we get is more Roslin/Apollo (not that that's a bad thing). All Adama wants to do is get into the fight, but his ship is ill-equipped and there's a petty bureaucrat trying to undermine his authority, and who has his only surviving son on her side. Later on, in "You Can't Go Home Again," the producers will claim that this is the first time Adama's really been emotionally compromised. To which I ask: what is he here? Throughout part 2, Roslin's going to be telling him the war is already lost. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the show is that it's a conflict between a military leader who feels and a political leader who thinks, as opposed to the other way around.
I can't cover four hours in one post. Part 2 will be up later today.
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