Battlestar Galactica Season 1 - 2005
The miniseries started things off with a nice bang, forcing the human race off of their 12 colonial worlds and onto a series of rickety spaceships, to be pursued, and heavily toyed with, by the robots they created. Season 1 of the show proper takes this exciting premise and does some stuff with it. Some of that stuff is good!
I enjoy the human side of this show greatly. These characters are all deeply human (even the ones that are secretly robots), and both the interpersonal moments of connection and strife and the larger sweep of politics and diplomacy are very fun. The tension between civilian society and military might comes to a head at the end of the season, and a populist rabblerouser continues to pop up his head and cause shenanigans. It’s also fun to see the logistical issues with keeping this haggard spacefleet fueled, fed, and watered. The standout characters at this point are stoic commander Adama, hotshot pilot Starbuck, and bumbling techie Gaius Baltar, who continues to fail upwards into real power despite being constantly sexually harassed by a hot imaginary robot lady.
What isn’t landing as much is anything involving the Cylons themselves. The show teases that they have “A Plan” at the start of every episode, and like the other show about a group of survivors building a society in the wilderness and discovering their destiny, Galactica needs to keep their Others from spilling all the beans out of the mystery box too quickly. As a result, these mfers are Enigmatic, constantly saying weird shit that means nothing to us now. It’s annoying. There’s a whole storyline on irradiated Caprica that stretches over the entire season and ultimately isn’t very interesting that ties into the Cylon Master Plan, whatever it happens to be.
The Cylons are fervent monotheists, while human society is some weird pagan mashup, and I’m starting to suspect that this story will end with the remains of humanity populating Earth and becoming the Jews (ugh). There’s a bunch of Prophecy as well, which seems like it’s going to become increasingly important. As long as this stuff is balanced with the real human interest side of things, even if it ends up being extremely stupid, count me in.