Starbuck and Cylons

As usual - what with having the cheapest cable TV package possible, the one they don't tell you about and you have to ask for specifically - we didn't see this series when it started its run on the Sci-fi channel, in 2003. So we've been renting one season after another from Netflix.

(I'm talking about the 're-imagined' Battlestar Galactica, by the way - not the original 1978 TV series, which I can vaguely remember watching on an old black and white set.)

Reviewers on amazon seem to be split about the re-imagined 'Battlestar'. A minority are outraged that the original series - apparently bright and positive and full of manly men and good morals - was tampered with to make the much darker and difficult 2003 version. The majority love the new stuff, and consider the older version to be, you know, so last century.

Apparently one of the causes of outrage was changing our rules-breaking, kickass hero Starbuck - into a woman. I have to question if the people complaining about this have actually seen the new series, since Katee Sackhoff - who plays Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace - is the compleat rules-breaking, kickass heroine. She is of course an attractive woman, but I love that they don't try to make her gussied-up and pretty like a fashion model.

So I'm going with the majority on this one. I wonder if seeing the series in compressed time - sometimes two or three episodes a night, with no commercial breaks - might have a different impact on viewers than the original idea of once a week. At any rate, I've been hooked from the first 5 minutes.

We have Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell - two actors of a certain age, both of them wonderful - playing Commander Adama of the Galactica and the President of the Colonies, respectively (the 40 or so people ahead of McDonnell's character in the line of succession all having been killed in the main Cylon attack). We have Michael Hogan as Saul Tigh (the eXO with a drinking problem and a wife with a very interesting history). And we have a group of younger characters, including the rather remarkable Cylon 'Six.'

One of the great additions to the re-imagined series is the idea that some Cylons are 'skin-jobs' - that is, they look and can act exactly like humans. This leads to consequences, which are just now - in the last weeks of the last season of the series - being played out.

Now if I can only figure out how to get a hold of the final episodes . . .