Battlestar Galactica is the Best Ever

I love scifi. When Joss Whedon did Firefly I nearly swooned. I'm now rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space 9 with the wife (thanks to Netflix) from front to back and I'm loving it. Best Star Trek ever.

But this post isn't about those other shows. They're fine in their own way, but the real king of scifi is Battlestar Galactica. I was watching some Battlestar featurettes on the SciFi website last night and this video (7m26s) stuck out as a perfect example of why I love Battlestar so much.

The basic point of the featurette is that there is a reason for everything that is done on the show and in the sets. Everything has been designed with and for a purpose from the very beginning, not as an after thought.

What this results in is a richness in the Battlestar "world" that adds to the drama, adds to the characters, makes things richer. It doesn't superscede or become a plot in itself (usually), but rather places the characters and their actions in a context that just works.

A good example of how all this works out is to contrast how Star Trek: The Next Generation dealt with the issue of the Holodeck versus how Battlestar dealt with the problems raised by the Cylons. There are innumerable episodes of Star Trek where the Holodeck runs ammock, threatening the ship and the crew.

Reasonable people, after this happens a dozen times, would turn the Holodeck off. The writers and producers of Star Trek wouldn't dream of that - after all, where would they get half of their plot devices from?

In the Battlestar universe the Cylons attach directly, with bullets and missiles, but they also use electronic warfare, trying to infect the computer systems of ships and fighters with paralyzing viruses. The Battlestar response to that is to regress technologically, take computers off the network, rely more on humans than on heavy automation. This makes sense - it's the logical and reasonable reaction to the circumstances raised by the Cylon threat.

So Battlestar has old looking telephones, but it's a practical consideration that led to this design choice, not merely an aesthetic choice. The fighters are oldschool, but that's for a reason. It works, and the level to which the writers and producers thought everything out provides a really rich framework in which to work.

I love it.