Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries
Until about three weeks ago, I thought there was little to no chance I would ever say, “I am a huge fan of Battlestar Galactica.” The original series never made much of an impression on me, and the 2003 miniseries managed to slip under my radar despite the fan controversies. But then I started hearing very good buzz on the ongoing series from people watching the overseas broadcasts (or downloaded copies of said broadcasts). So I decided to start watching the Sci Fi broadcasts from the beginning, starting with their rebroadcast of the miniseries right before the series premiere.
I am now a huge fan of Battlestar Galactica.
From the writing to the production to the performances, this is the most sure-footed start to a science fiction series that I can recall, and it ranks right up there with the best conventional series I’ve seen. There’s a level of depth and complexity here that’s really rewarding. I don’t want to say that there are no heroes here, because I do think that most of the human characters are heroic in one way or another, but they’re neither so perfect as to be unapproachable or so deeply flawed as to be almost antiheroes. And while the Cylons are clearly villains here, there’s some effort made to show how that villainy developed. I’m not saying that humanity deserved what it got in this story, but there’s an effort to establish that actions have consequences, consequences which are often unforeseen. That’s certainly true in Baltar’s case - rather than an out and out traitor, he’s someone who’s always assumed himself to be smarter than everyone in the room to the point that the rules don’t necessarily apply to him. In the end, that makes him easy to manipulate. But while he may be going crazy as a result, he’s not going quietly.
The tone here is unapologetically dark, with no one feeling fine at the end of the world. Even the minor characters sell the fact that everything they know has just been ripped out from under them. Time after time 
characters have to make choices that they know will lead to some deaths in order to save the lives that they can - from Tyrol having to vent the decks to Helo and Boomer holding a lottery for spots on a ship off planet to Apollo and Roslin having to leave the slower-than-light ships in the survivor convoy behind. You could make an argument that in scenes like Number Six killing the baby, or the little girl talking about her plans with her family, writer Ronald Moore goes over the top. I didn’t think so, but I have a three year old daughter, and the two most terrifying things in my life are the possibilities that I might either lose her or not be able to be part of her life as she grows up. So I had a big ol’ emotional button just waiting there for Moore to push.
That tone, and the oft-stated desire of the producers to do something that explores the post-September-11 mindset, probably explain one of the major choices Moore made in his world-building - namely, that in many places, he doesn’t. There has certainly been thought put into the relationships between the 12 Colonies of Kobol and the Cylons, as well as some of their religious and cultural practices (including a fondness for octagons), but in many respects Moore says that Galactica’s society is our society. The space liner to Galactica seems much like a conventional airline; the clothes don’t seem out of place; the units of measurement are standard; the streets look a heck of a lot like Vancouver; Roslin has cancer; the Cylons drop nukes. A lot of exotic world-building makes sense on a show like Farscape, where the goal is to stress the alien-ness of the environment. But Galactica wants you to identify with this world, to not think of it as alien. And so what Moore might give up in terms of sheer logic is more than made up for by what he gains in emotional identification.
The sets and production design are impressive. Personally, I think the producers generally hit the right mix in terms of keeping influences from the old series while also striking a new path. The Galactica certainly has a lived-in, military look, and the backstory provides an explanation of why a faster than light ship would have a decidedly old-tech mechanical look in places. A lot has been made of the show’s “documentary” style camera work, which is very noticeable in the space sequences and somewhat less so in the interior scenes - which is fine by me, because I think it would be very easy and possibly very boring to go overboard on that look. Earl has discussed the music in his review of the miniseries soundtrack, so I’ll just say I like it a lot. The percussive and choral elements do a very good job of establishing emotion and tone without using the kind of orchestral music that might be more familiar in this genre.
Any conversation about the cast and characters has to start with Edward James Olmos’ Commander Adama. I think this guy’s picture is in the dictionary under “quiet intensity.” Olmos’ presence and ability to convey emotion with restraint gives a solid footing to any exchange he’s in, and gives great impact to those moments where he does raise his voice or demonstrate his passion. While Olmos is far and away my favorite member of the cast, I can’t think of anyone who really drops the ball. Jamie Bamber does a nice job with an Apollo who is trying to figure out who he is while still fulfilling his responsibilities. Katee Sackhoff’s Starbuck is a good foil for him (and for Michael Hogan’s Tigh), and her relationship with Adama keeps her from being simply the anti-authority lone wolf figure. (And I gotta say, the Television without Pity recapper who nicknamed Hogan’s Tigh “Col. McCain” was on to something.) I’m even enjoying the “is-she-real-or-am-I-nuts” interplay between Tricia Helfer’s Number Six and James Callis’ Baltar.
Mary McDonnell as President Roslin is in a tough spot. She has to stand toe to toe with Olmos and make Roslin a character who’s certainly in over her head but with enough strength to provide balance in the political/military conflict that the series establishes. Adama is clearly more assured in his new role than Roslin is, but to a large extent that’s because he isn’t being called upon to make anywhere near the kind of leap in responsibility that she is. I don’t get a sense of her as incompetent, but rather needing time and experience to grow into the job. But given the circumstances, it’s not clear that she or the fleet has that kind of time. McDonnell succeeds in getting all of this across, to the point that I don’t automatically think that she’s wrong just because she disagrees with Adama.
OK, having said all that, and before I talk about the extras on the DVDs, let me spend a moment on the question that came up as soon as Sci Fi said it wanted to do a “re-imagining” of the series: “Why start from scratch? Why not tell this story as a continuation of the old series?” Like I said before, I have absolutely no attachment to the old series, but I completely understand this point of view. I’m a comics fan, and this sort of start-from-scratch approach gets used fairly often in order to clean up convoluted continuity. As necessary as it might be, such things often get perceived as a slap in the face to fans, who are apparently being told that the stories they liked so much “never happened,” with perhaps an undercurrent that suggests they weren’t good enough to keep. What I try to keep in mind is that the old stories still exist, and nothing can take away my enjoyment of them. And if I don’t like the new versions, I can just continue to enjoy the old ones while looking elsewhere for new stories. (This is certainly the approach that Olmos has endorsed.)
That said, the questions remains - in the case of Galactica, was it necessary to start from scratch? I would say that it absolutely was, for a number of reasons. For one thing, continuity glitches are almost inevitable, even once you determine what’s going to count as canon. The first season? Galactica 1980? (Yeah, didn’t think so.) Richard Hatch’s books? (Spinoffs always have their own fans.) And fans aren’t likely to take kindly to those glitches - look at Enterprise. For another, based on comments I’ve read from Hatch, conversations I’ve had with Earl, and my own familiarity with Glen Larson’s Buck Rogers series, it seems like the two series would have such vastly different tones that they would be hard to reconcile as part of the same universe. Further, certain plot elements that Moore has introduced, like the Cylons being created by humans, wouldn’t fit into a continuation.
Most importantly, however, this is a story that needs to be told from the beginning. So much of the drama here comes from these characters having just survived the apocalypse, from the massive upheaval they’ve suffered in just the last few weeks. If you do Galactica: The Next Generation, all of your characters have had 25 years to get used to life aboard the ragtag fleet. For some characters, born in space, it would be the only life they’d known. A fledgling society would have established itself; the rebuilding project would already be well underway, even if humanity were still searching for Earth or another potential homeworld. I am not saying that you can’t tell good stories in that setting. But they wouldn’t be this story. And given that Moore is telling this story with such skill and passion, I am very glad that this story exists.
The followup question might be, if it’s going to be a new story, why call it Battlestar Galactica? There are certainly practical reasons, as Moore mentions in his audio commentary with director Michael Rymer and fellow executive producer David Eick. It is a name that casual viewers are familiar with, and which might inspire those casual viewers to see what the new version is like. There is a blessing and a curse in this - increased awareness means increased expectations, and when those expectations aren’t met, it can lead to problems. You get a sense from the commentary that Moore wanted to make the best possible use of the advantage - to use the brand name to bring people to check out a new and different take on things, and then keep that audience by telling stories that hadn’t been done before. (And I don’t think I need a psychology degree to think that working on Star Trek for so long might have fueled that desire on Moore’s part.) But even beyond the name recognition, I think that enough of the basic concepts of the series have been maintained that to not acknowledge the source material would have been a mistake.
The rest of the commentary is well worth a listen, as the three talk about the production, the choices they made about where to take the story, how Olmos and the other actors helped shape the story on the set, and more. They address some of the fan controversies, as well as Olmos’ comments that diehard fans of the original series should skip the miniseries. (They call it the best publicity they could have gotten.) The commentary was recorded as production for the first season was beginning, so there’s some talk about how the story would progress, including a change or two from what Moore envisioned with the miniseries. There’s also a fair amount of discussion of Number Six and the increased role of sexuality in the new Galactica. Moore has a rather good point, in that SF fans often have little trouble in sexualizing women - witness Leia’s metal bikini or Seven of Nine’s catsuit - but seemed to take great offense when actual sex was presented. On the other hand, a Women’s Studies major could have a field day with Rymer’s comments about female sexuality being used as a weapon. In the end, I don’t have that much of a problem with it - the sexual angle of the interplay between Six and Baltar could easily become overdone, but so far I don’t quite think they’ve stepped over the line.
I should probably make the same complaint here that I’ve made about other commentaries - I don’t need to hear about how Moore and company wanted to totally reinvent the science fiction series. Galactica is good because what it does, it does very well. But I’m not sure that many, or even any, of those elements are wholly unique. Richard Gibbs’ percussive score is very good, yes, but Evan Chen also tried to give an SF series a nontraditional score with Crusade. Galactica features actual sexual relationships between characters, but so did Farscape, and Earl will be along any second to remind me about Lexx. The space scenes seem to combine the aesthetic of 2001 with some of the three-dimensional dogfights that Babylon 5 attempted early in its run, and I have read some comparisons of the documentary approach to Space: Above and Beyond’s effects. Again, I am taking nothing away from Galactica here. Moore certainly seems to have a unique voice, and a particular set of themes he wants to explore. That, along with its high quality, make Galactica unique. I’m just tired of SF producers acting like no one else in the genre has tried anything original in the last 20 years. OK, vent over.
Also included is a collection of deleted scenes, including some action sequences that edit in pre-visualizations sequences to take the place of effects shots that were left uncompleted when the sequences in question were cut. I like this approach because it combines a little bit of story background with a peek at the behind-the-scenes making-of angle. It’s fun to see the very basic stripped-down animations and compare them to the finished shots that made it to air. None of the scenes are essential, and it’s easy to see why they were cut for time or to improve the pacing, but viewed separately they add some context to the events and relationships.
Finally, Sci Fi’s Lowdown special on the miniseries also appears. A combination of interview footage with clips from the original series and the mini, this doesn’t really go in-depth as a documentary - it’s primarily an EPK-like piece of publicity material. That said, I will give them credit for not ducking the fan controversies and giving Hatch some space to talk about why he was disappointed by the decision to start over. You have to read behind the lines a little bit to see how unhappy he was at that point in time, but the sense is clearly there. (And hey, Hatch came around enough to do a couple of guest spots in the new series’ first season.) There’s also a slightly awkward sequence of Sackhoff and Dirk Benedict meeting in a coffeehouse - I’ll let you guess which one - that probably didn’t do a whole lot to defuse things, but was a nice gesture nonetheless. I’m not sure we needed to see a segment devoted to Helfer’s photo shoot for Maxim magazine, but somewhere along the line someone clearly decided there was something to be gained by pushing Helfer to the forefront of publicity. Indeed, she appears front and center on the case for the miniseries, even while some Universal catalogs have a mockup of an older cover that had Olmos and McDonnell sharing that center position.
My copy of the miniseries is a double-sided disc, and the menus do advise flipping the disc to access certain features. I have read on other DVD sites that some copies of the set went out as two single-sided discs, but kept the flipping instructions. Not a big deal, but it may be something to keep an eye out for.
This DVD is a great introduction to what I think may go down as one of the best science fiction series ever made. It’d definitely worth your while to get in here on the ground floor.