Battlestar Galactica (Series 1)

I am a self confessed geek and have been watching sci-fi space shows for years. I tend to prefer series that develop characters and have a strong underlying plot that keeps you intrigued while still allowing for enjoyment of the individual episodes. My personal favorite (so far) was Babylon 5.

I remember watching the original series of Battlestar Galactica and while it was an interesting show, having ‘grown up’ I felt the original was more for teenagers than for adults. The characters were all ‘tongue-in-cheek’ and a lot of the episodes had that same quality of early Star Trek – that is, the good guy beats up the bad guy and all is well. Therefore due to my opinion of the original series, I had little interest in a remake as I wrongly assumed it would be much the same. Having recently re-watched all the Babylon 5 series, and even delving into the spin-off series that wasn’t anywhere as near as good, I finally took the plunge and bought Battlestar Galactica: series one.


The miniseries starts the show off, with basically a long introduction to some of the characters, and the beginnings of the web of intrigue that is the story. After a fifty year truce, the Cylons (faithful robot servants that turned against humanity) break the truce and bombard all of human’s colonies with nuclear weapons (I note that Earth is not included as a colony, but is some mythical place that no-one believes in). Commander Adama (James Olmos) leads a fleet of surviving ships away from the colonies in search of this mystical planet.

The miniseries introduces all the main characters from the new President Roslin (Mary McDonnell), who as a lowly Secretary of Education becomes the president when all other people in line to the presidency are killed, to Gaius Baltor (James Callis) - perhaps my favorite character of the series, who falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a Cylon I forgot to mention that Cylons now look like humans . Through his affair with this Cylon he somehow manages to give away military secrets that lead to the attack on humanity – his ‘betrayal’ of humanity is a major theme throughout the series as he continues to battle his guilt over the ‘betrayal’.

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