The Battlestar Galactica Reboot Was Ahead of Its Time In Some Unfortunate Ways

 After watching the original Battlestar Galactica, I got around to watching the reboot series finally.  I started watching it on TubiTV like the original but then realized it was on Peacock for free and that in some ways worked better.  My brother said when I talked about the original that it went downhill halfway through the third season but for me it was really the end of the second season.  So it had two good seasons and then it just got harder and harder to watch, though ironically I watched those last seasons faster so I could get through them.

Anyway, watching it now you do have to consider the context of when it came out.  In 2004 most basic cable channels were still mostly showing reruns of old shows and movies.  Some like FX, USA, and the Sci-Fi Channel had original content, but not as much and most of it was pretty low-grade PG-13 at worst.  There was The Sopranos on HBO but this was still before Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Walking Dead, and other R-rated shows.  This was before Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and a plethora of streaming services all coming out with original content too.

So this show with its grittiness, violence, cursing, sex, and adult situations was still somewhat new for basic cable.  And as the title says, it was ahead of its time in some unfortunate ways.

Like the original, this starts with a miniseries that sets up the series.  For a long time the 12 Colonies, pretty much all with some bastardized Greek astrology name, have been at war with the Cylons, a race of robots humans had created originally as servants.  The Cylons became self-aware and turned on the humans and a long and bloody war ensued.

But for 40 years the Cylons have been gone and the colonies have been at peace.  Then on Armistice Day, the Cylons launch a sneak attack and nuke all 12 colonies.  They wipe out most of the Colonial Armed Forces by exploiting the networked computers of the colonial forces.  The titular Battlestar Galactica survives because it was old and being turned into a museum, sort of like the aircraft carrier Intrepid in New York harbor, so it didn't have any networks for the Cylons to exploit.  It also had older model Viper fighters that the Cylons couldn't turn off.

Along with Galactica there's a group of civilian ships that manage to flee the carnage.  Their first stop is at an old supply depot so they can get munitions to carry on the fight.  With some cunning and desperate maneuvers they manage to escape the Cylons and then start to look for the mythical "13th Colony" called...Earth.  But the Cylons are still in pursuit and there are human-looking ones who could possibly be spying on the humans.

Almost all the characters from the previous series are in this, but many have been changed.  A key difference is that in the old series everyone pretty much just had one name.  Commander Adama was Adama.  Apollo was Apollo.  Starbuck was Starbuck.  And so on.  In the reboot they have full, normal sounding names like Lee Adama, Kara Thrace, and Sharon Valeri while "Apollo," "Starbuck," and "Boomer" are callsigns or nicknames like "Maverick" and "Goose" and "Ice Man" in Top Gun.

Another major change is that in the original Adama was head of the military and civilian government.  But in the reboot he's commander of the military while the head of the civilian government (and ostensibly Adama's boss) is Laura Roslin, the Secretary of Education who was aboard Galactica for the ceremony to make it a museum.  She's the only Cabinet member to survive the attack and thus becomes president.  The caveat is that Roslin has terminal cancer and has only months to live.

In the original Baltar is a traitor who convinced the colonies to let their guard down for peace talks, during which the Cylons ambushed them.  He was then given his own Cylon base ship to hunt down the Galactica and civilian ships.  In the reboot Dr. Gaius Baltar is a supposed genius who inadvertently allows a Cylon agent to access the Ministry of Defense computers to let the Cylons take down the defenses of the colonies.

Near the end of the miniseries, it's learned there are 12 models of human-looking Cylons with many copies of some models.  At the end we see that Sharon "Boomer" Valeri is one of those, only she doesn't know it yet.  As the first season begins there's a second Sharon model on the Colonial capital planet Caprica who is seducing Karl "Helo" Agathon, who gave up his seat on a rescue ship so the "brilliant" Baltar could survive.  Through the first season Helo and the Sharon are on the run, though he doesn't know it's really an elaborate experiment to test whether the Cylons can fall in love and make babies with humans.

Meanwhile the Galactica and its civilian ships are on the run in space.  Boomer goes into a trance and blows up much of the ship's store of water but then is the one who finds an asteroid containing water to replace it.  At the end of the first season they have to take out a Cylon refinery to capture a supply of tylium fuel.

In the second season they work in a couple of stories from the old show.  First is the discovery of Kobol, the place where the colonies came from.  In the old show it looked like ancient Egypt but in the reboot it's British Columbia--where they were filming, I assume.  There's this whole overcomplicated thing where they need the "Arrow of Apollo" (the god not the character in the show) and so Starbuck goes back to Caprica to find it, which takes a large chunk of the season, during which she finds some resistance fighters led by a former pro athlete who played "pyramid," a sort of basketball-handball-rugby game introduced in the original show.  Starbuck escapes with the arrow but she can't take the others and promises to return later.  In an Indiana Jones-style way the arrow shows them a view from Earth to help guide them.

Later, they find a second Battlestar that survived the attack, the Pegasus.  In the old show it was captained by Lloyd Bridges and after two episodes it disappeared, never to be seen again.  In the reboot it's captained by the former Ensign Ro of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Her name is Admiral Cain, like the old Bogart war movie The Caine Mutiny and like him, she's a hard commander who really has no problem sacrificing anyone or anything to get the job done.  When she met some civilian ships, she had them cannibalized for parts--and personnel.  (More on this is shown in the movie Razor, which was included at the end of season 3 on Peacock.)  Since Cain is an admiral, she outranks Adama and takes over the fleet--until she's conveniently killed off and Adama is promoted to admiral.  Her second-in-command is then bumped off by the mafia and then John Heard of Home Alone and Sharknado fame takes over for an episode where he dies like Spock in Wrath of Khan.  And then Adama puts Apollo in charge.

And then for me the series takes a nose-dive.  There's an election where Baltar defeats Roslin.  In an ironic twist for 2021, Roslin was going to rig the election but Adama convinces her to do the moral thing.  What's the worst that can happen, right?

The worst is that scouts have found a habitable planet and Baltar decides to settle everyone there on "New Caprica."  The show then in mid-episode jumps forward a year to where Galactica and Pegasus are being run by skeleton crews and most everyone is living in tents on the surface.  Because they don't have trees to make cabins or something?  They don't know how to make cement?  They don't have empty shipping containers or something?

Oh, and everyone is pairing up and getting married!  Starbuck rescued the resistance fighter Sam on Caprica and married him.  Apollo married Dualla, his XO on the Pegasus.  Chief Tyrol, the head mechanic guy, married his subordinate Cally, whose jaw he broke like two episodes ago.  Roslin is teaching school on the surface while President Baltar is using his interns like a harem.  And Adama grew a really crappy mustache.

Then Cylons show up and the colonial ships all jump away, leaving those on the surface to get taken over by the Cylons.

The next season picks up 4 months later with the Cylons occupying New Caprica with Baltar in charge of the vichy government and recruiting humans to police it.  Colonel Tigh had an eye taken out and is tortured by the Cylons until his wife manages to get him sprung by banging the head Cylon.  Meanwhile Chief Tyrol and Starbuck's husband Sam are leading a resistance similar to Iraq or Afghanistan.  Out in space, Apollo is wearing a fat suit and his dad still has a crappy mustache.  Eventually they rescue most everyone on New Caprica, at the cost of losing the Pegasus.  If the show had been called Battlestar Pegasus or Battlestars or something they probably would have done the smart thing and sacrificed Galactica since it was older and crappier.

Then after that the season goes all soap opera-y for a while as Apollo and Starbuck cheat on their spouses with each other and Chief Tyrol and Cally struggle with their marriage and blah blah.  Eventually they find a planet with a lot of algae they can use for food but also on the planet is some kind of weird temple that should help them find Earth, but the Cylons get there at the same time and there's a standoff that's interrupted by the system's sun going nova.

The end of this season has Starbuck going crazy and disappearing in a storm and then returning a month or two later in a nebula.  Also in the nebula, four people hear that Hendrix song, "All Along the Watchtower" and realize they're Cylons.  They're Tigh, Tyrol, Sam, and Tory, the president's aide.  They're four of the "Final Five," which is a big thing for the Cylons because they were like the first Cylons or some shit.  But why weren't they mentioned earlier?  Because other Cylons are programmed not to think about them, sort of like Robocop was programmed not to think about Directive 4 in the original movie.

But who's the final Final Five member?  It has to be someone important, right?  Adama, Starbuck, Apollo...or maybe someone new and important?  Or it could just be a character we didn't care much about who was thought to be dead.

Yeah, it's that one.  It turns out Tigh and his wife  have some kind of Hawkman/Hawkgirl thing going on where they keep resurrecting and finding each other or whatever.  When Tigh's wife comes back to life on the main Cylon ship, she remembers everything.  And though I just said the Cylons were not supposed to think about the Final Five, apparently now they know who she is and apparently always knew and bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

The Final Five get together and with Starbuck's help they find Earth.  Except it's all ruined and radioactive like the end of Planet of the Apes, though nothing as iconic as the Statue of Liberty is shown.  Apparently the 13th Tribe already made their own Cylons and the same thing happened.  Meanwhile Starbuck finds her crashed fighter and dead body, but she doesn't vaporize or anything.

The Final Five realize that they came from this Earth.  They were real humans back then working on creating Cylons.  They transferred themselves to Cylon bodies when the planet was destroyed and then somehow got to the 12 Colonies and the cycle began all over again...or something.  The idea like in the crappy Matrix sequels is that Cylons destroying humanity is inevitable.  Um...I guess?

Everyone is super bummed they found "Earth" and can't live there.  Dualla kills herself; the vice-president and some officers launch a space mutiny; and they find out the ship is literally falling apart and will need to be scrapped.  On top of that turd sundae, a half-Cylon/half-human child made by Helo and his Cylon wife Sharon is kidnapped and taken to the big Cylon base that's located by a black hole.

Adama rounds up some volunteers and the Galactica goes on one final mission to get the kid because she's important...somehow.  There's a battle but a truce is worked out when the Final Five agree to help the other Cylons get their resurrection device back...until Tyrol realizes that Tory murdered his wife because Cally found out about them.  He kills her and the truce is off but the head evil Cylon kills himself for...reasons and the Galactica escapes when Starbuck plays "All Along the Watchtower" on the FTL control keyboard.

They wind up appearing at...Earth!  You see that other Earth wasn't the real Earth, as in the one we know.  This is our Earth...except it's 150,000 years ago!  Somehow the rest of the fleet shows up and everyone embraces Apollo's idea that instead of building cities and stuff they should hunt and gather and live like fracking primitives.  Why would everyone instantly embrace this stupid idea?  I mean all these people have done is bitch and whine since Day 1 and now they just submissively agree to give up everything and live the simple life on Earth?  Well, I guess it was the last episode, so we need to wrap things up quick.

Roslin dies, Adama buries her, Starbuck vanishes without a trace, and everyone else scatters to start a new life...

Baltar, the dick who got all but 50,000 people slaughtered, gets to go riding off into the sunset with his Cylon girlfriend.  That seems fair, right?  In the present of 2009 Baltar and his girlfriend are there except it's not really them, they're "angels" or something.  The half-Cylon/half-human girl was found in Africa and classified as a missing link.  Hooray?

I did really like the first two seasons but then it got all caught up in its own bullshit with this phony mystical crap.  By the end I was thinking to myself, "Remember when this was a show about humans in space fleeing from robots with lots of cool battles and shit?"  What happened to that show?

The whole concept of the Cylons in some ways didn't make sense.  They were referred to as "machines" and "toasters" and that they have "software" instead of brains yet the human ones are indistinguishable from normal humans.  In the miniseries when they're having sex the human Cylons's spines turn bright red but that's discarded later.  If the human-looking Cylons really were machines, wouldn't they be like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator:  skin over metal?  In which case shouldn't they have been easy to identify?  Or were they some kind of biological hardware?  It's never really defined all that well, though I suppose by now there's plenty of fansplaining on the Internet.

Getting back to my title, the last two seasons seemed very much like Game of Thrones and Walking Dead where it seemed like the writers/producers were actively trolling the audience by killing off everyone good or just turning them into assholes.  

No one was that more obvious with than Dualla.  At the start she was a crewmember on the bridge and she and the president's dorky aide Billy had a thing going on.  Then all the sudden she's hooking up with Apollo for no reason, Billy is killed, and she's marrying Apollo.  They mostly just argue and then she pretty much disappears for a large chunk of the 3rd/4th seasons before killing herself for no real reason.  Her and Billy were a cute couple in a Rom-and-Leeta-on-DS9-way but then they had to fuck that up to hook her up with Apollo, who apparently only married her because Starbuck was taken.  Ugh.

Her crewmate Gaeta was similarly fucked over.  At the start he was a dorky tech guy on the bridge.  Then he becomes Baltar's aide on New Caprica and secretly provides the resistance with information.  Then he doesn't do much for a while until he gets shot in the leg, has it cut off, and turns all bitter.  He helps organize the space mutiny and winds up getting executed by a firing squad.  Ugh.

Chief Tyrol initially was awesome in a Chief O'Brien on ST TNG and DS9 way as the heroic blue collar everyman.  Then they had to fuck that up with him going all PTSD and beating up Cally and then they inexplicably get married and then he finds out he's a Cylon.  After his wife dies he shaves his head and goes all nuts and then murders Tory for murdering his wife.  Ugh.

One great episode Tyrol and the rest of the crew make a stealth fighter called the Blackbird out of spare parts.  The project brought everyone together and was a rare bright spot.  So of course two episodes later it gets blown up and they never make another one.  Ugh.

On top of that they made Starbuck a raving lunatic most of the 4th season and then she just disappears.  Adama and Roslin had a thing building up the whole series and when they finally can get together, she dies.  And so it goes...

Like those later shows, the last couple seasons especially seemed determined to suck all light and hope from those watching.  Then like GOT the end was really unsatisfying.  It really sticks in my craw because it started out so well.

Fun Facts:  My brother mentioned this before but the national anthem of the colonies is the theme song of the original series.  As well the older model Cylons and their ships are the same designs as in the original series.  The older model Vipers are also the same (or really close) as in the original show.

Original creator Glen A Larson was attached as a consulting producer and original Apollo Richard Hatch frequently guest starred as Tom Zarek, a political prisoner who becomes vice-president and a couple times actual president.  I didn't recognize any other familiar faces but there might have been some.

In the TV show, pilot Lee Adama is the son of Commander Adama.  In real life, the pilot known as "Hot Dog" was played by the son of Edward James Olmos, who plays Commander/Admiral Adama.  Fake and real nepotism!

Co-creator Ronald D Moore and some of the cast voiced characters in my favorite Robot Chicken episode, the first one of season 4.  In the opening, Robot Chicken creators Seth Green and Matthew Senreich go to see Moore to ask for a job and he says, "What do I need help with?  I just throw a dart at a cast list and they're a Cylon!"  At the end of the episode, there's a sketch for a new thing called "Just the Good Parts" that will only show the important parts of a TV show or movie--like the "I am your father" part of Empire Strikes Back.  For Galactica it's just everyone saying, "I'm a Cylon."  There was another sketch in a different season where they make fun of how the show uses the made up curse word "frack" and then has them making up a bunch of other ridiculous curses.  Then it cuts to an FCC censor who says, "What the fuck are they saying?"

Speaking of Robot Chicken, Katee Sackhoff, who played Starbuck, is a frequent contributor as the voice of "Bitch Pudding," a Strawberry Shortcake parody character.  Like Harley Quinn it's a character that was probably supposed to only show up once but became insanely popular even though I never really liked her.  There was even a whole special episode devoted to Bitch Pudding.  Star Wars fans would recognize Sackhoff more as the live action Bo Katan in the second season of The Mandalorian and I assume she'll show up again in season 3.

Ronald D Moore worked on Star Trek TNG and DS9 and there are some parallels with DS9.  Besides the grimmer, grittier tone, there's all the mystical religious bullshit like "The Prophets" and all that Bajoran stuff in DS9.  In DS9 Constable Odo was a shapeshifter and then in season 3 it's revealed that his people are "The Founders," the rulers of the Gamma Quadrant.  When the Founders go to war against the Federation and its allies, they use their shapeshifting to infiltrate Federation ships and even Earth.  It provides the same sort of paranoia and mistrust as with the human-looking Cylons in Galactica.  Dr. Baltar is kind of a mix of Gul Dukat and Dumar in that he starts out as a bad guy, then becomes a leader of a sham government, then becomes a religious figure, and then becomes a hero--though unlike Dukat and Dumar he doesn't die.  In the third season the crew opens a bar that's kind of like Quark's, only crappier.

The creator of Quantum Leap worked on the original series and one of the stars of Quantum Leap, Dean Stockwell, frequently appears as the evil Cylon Cavil or John.

I mentioned how the Cylons took advantage of the colonial network computers to deactivate their weapons.  This same trick was used a couple years later in Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles when the robotic Haydonites put backdoor code in the weapons they make for the Robotech Expeditionary Force so they can shut them off when they're ready to reveal themselves as bad guys.  And like Galactica, the only ships that were safe were those too old or down with maintenance.  Another similar Robotech thing was in the penultimate episode the Galactica rams into a Cylon station and from the front of it a bunch of troops pour out into the enemy station.  There was a similar tactic frequently used in the first series of Robotech where the SDF-1 would use the aircraft carrier Daedalus welded onto it like an arm and punch an enemy ship.  Then the front of the carrier would open and a bunch of robots would fire missiles into the enemy ship to blow it up.

I deliberately mentioned a "space mutiny" a couple of times because the crappy movie Space Mutiny used footage of the original Galactica series for its space battles and ships.  In a late episode, Starbuck's husband Sam needs brain surgery and Doc Cottle says to get "the brain guy."  This was funny to me because in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 seasons that were made for the Sci-Fi channel from 1997-1999 there was a character called "Brain Guy" played by Bill Corbett.  To add to the fun, the "brain guy" was played by John Hodgman, who has worked with Corbett and the other Rifftrax guys in some of their SketchFest shows in San Francisco.  It's all connected!

Facts more fun than the show itself.

Representation Scorecard:  If you want to tally the score on representation, in some ways this was worse than the original.  In the original Tigh and Boomer were both black men, but in this reboot Tigh is white and Boomer is an Asian woman.  Adama is Latino instead of white, so there's also that.  But really the only black main character was Dualla and look what happened to her.  

This series does score better on gender representation as besides Boomer, they also gender swapped Starbuck and there were a lot more female pilots.  Unlike the original they didn't really make an issue of whether women could fly Vipers.  I'm sure at some point it passed the Bechdel Test but I wasn't really keeping track.  Probably when Starbuck and the other hotshot female pilot Kat were talking about shooting down "Scar" a sort of Cylon Red Baron would count as passing that.

Though the show was liberal in a lot of ways there really weren't any gay characters.  I think there was a girl-on-girl kiss at one point but that was about it.

So it's kind of a mixed bag if you're the type to keep score on that.