Battlestar Galactica Review

The miniseries and the first two seasons are among the most serious things American genre television has attempted. Moore stripped the source of its camp entirely and built a fleet running out of fuel, water and people, with an on screen population counter that dropped and never rose. The New Caprica arc is the boldest sequence, casting the human resistance as suicide bombers against an occupying force that believes it is helping, and airing while those comparisons were extremely live.

Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell play two people making impossible administrative decisions and never let it curdle into speechmaking. The handheld zoom applied to space combat was a real innovation and has been copied constantly since. Where it fails is the mythology. The show promised that its religious framework had a plan, then resolved that promise with a revelation which reads as a shrug, and the final season is padded out with a mutiny arc and a musical clue. Extraordinary at its peak, and a permanent argument about how to end a mystery.