BATTLESTAR GALACTICA reboot to be rebooted, for some reason

The Battlestar Galactica reboot is getting a reboot, because that's how things work now.

NBC has tapped Sam Esmail, the creative genius behind Mr. Robot, to take charge of a third iteration of the Battlestar Galactica franchise. The series will spearhead NBC Universal's new streaming service, which has the decidedly underwhelming name of "Peacock."

Battlestar Galactica was created by Glen A. Larson and aired as a single season on ABC in 1978-79, followed by a half-season, mid-season replacement sequel series called Galactica 1980, which is best being never watched or remembered. The original Battlestar was quite popular, but the absolutely titanic budget for the series prevented it from continuing.

In 2003 the Sci-Fi Channel, as it was then called, rebooted the show with Ronald D. Moore as executive producer and showrunner. The rebooted Galactica was a darker, moodier affair, much-informed by 9/11 and the War on Terror. With its low-fi aesthetics (no lasers, cute kids or robot dogs) and gritty attitude, the show won a whole new legion of fans as well as widespread critical acclaim, including Hugo and Peabody awards and multiple Emmy Awards in technical categories. The New York Times declared it one of the twenty best shows of the 21st century so far - a peer of The Wire, The Americans and Breaking Bad - just a few months ago.

Battlestar Galactica 2.0 concluded in 2009 with a highly divisive finale - one arguably even more polarising than Game of Thrones' or Lost's - before following it up with an unsuccessful spin-off show, Caprica, and a one-off TV movie, Blood and Chrome, in 2013. This iteration of the franchise has continued to be developed in video games, such as the excellent Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock, and a well-received board game and new miniatures game.

News that a third version of the show is in development has already been met with scepticism. The original 1978 version of the show was promising but cheesy, so the idea of rebooting it was quite valid and Moore more than delivered on the promise inherent in the premise, even if he didn't quite stick the landing. The question arises what a third version of the same idea could deliver.

The one interesting thing about the idea is the creative talent involved. Previously, X-Men director Bryan Singer had been attached to a film reboot (for the second time, having previously worked on a TV version in the late 1990s and early 2000s that was superseded by Moore's), which would have been the wrong medium. Sam Esmail is also a genuinely provocative and talented writer and director, whose Mr. Robot (which concludes with its fourth season early next year) is one of the best shows currently airing. Esmail's take on BSG could be very interesting, although it remains to be seen what he could bring to the table that is genuinely different. Certainly Ronald D. Moore seems intrigued by the idea, and has given Esmail his blessing to develop a fresh take on the franchise.

Battlestar Galactica 3.0 remains in development, but if NBC pull the trigger it will likely be fast-tracked to debut next year.

UPDATE: Sam Esmail has taken to Twitter to confirm that the new show will not be a reboot of Moore's version of the show, but will instead "explore a new story in the mythology whilst remaining true to the spirit of Battlestar. What this means precisely remains to be seen, but it may be an indication that the new show could be set within the Moore continuity but in a previously unseen time frame, such as the original exodus from Kobol to the Twelve Colonies, or the settling of the Thirteenth Colony. More information as we get it.

Gratuitous Lists: Top Ten SFF Pilots

Five years ago, I talked about the best SFF finales, the shows that stuck their landings with good, rousing endings. Even rarer than a good ending is a good pilot, a great first episode that hooks you into a show for the duration. Many shows take a good 3-4 episodes to bed in and start getting good, so shows which are on fire from the first episode are rarer, and more valuable to networks.

Here is a list of ten of the best show-openers (in no particular order). Note that I have used "pilot" to mean "the first episode of the series" rather than the technical definition (a premiere episode filmed separately to the rest of the series, not always for public consumption).

Battlestar Galactica: The Mini-Series

Aired 8-9 December 2003

Ronald D. Moore worked on the Star Trek franchise over a decade, starting on The Next Generation in 1989 and rounding off the final season of Deep Space Nine in 1999, co-writing two movies along the way. In 2000 he joined the writing team of Star Trek: Voyager in its sixth season, but quickly found his goals for the series being thwarted. He wanted to see Voyager, trapped far from home on the other side of the galaxy, taking damage and staying damaged from episode to episode. He wanted to see more consistent characterisation, the morals of Starfleet being tested in extreme circumstances. Instead the other writers and producers wanted to hit the reset button at the end of every week.

Three years later, Moore was approached by the Sci-Fi Network (now SyFy) with an intriguing offer. They'd picked up the rights to 1978 space opera Battlestar Galactica and were developing a remake project. A previous reboot attempt, with X-Men producers Bryan Singer and Tom DeSanto, had foundered in the wake of 9/11 and SyFy were now looking for a fresh take. Moore agreed to take on the project on the understanding that he wanted to make it a more gritty and adult show. Although he'd enjoyed the original show, he felt the premise had been under-valued. The destruction of twelve planets and the deaths of billions of people would have left a staggering mental scar on the survivors, not to mention raising extreme ethical concerns of how the military and civilian authorities worked together in such circumstances, not to mention the collective PTSD of having tens of thousands of people trapped in spacecraft with dwindling supplies for months or years on end.

The result was a mini-series, aired on SyFy and then NBC in 2003, which served as a backdoor pilot for a series proper. And it'd be fair to say that Moore and his team knocked it out of the park. The second the mini-series opens it feels different. Director Michael Rymer created a shaky, immediate style of shooting that put the viewer in the heart of the action. Composer Richard Gibbs used a drums-heavy sound to create a very different, military-feeling soundtrack. The actors, a mix of newcomers like Jamie Bamber and Katee Sackhoff and industry veterans like Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, are uniformly excellent. The visual effects by CG studio Zoic are (still) amazing. Over the course of a generous three hours, the mini-series builds the world of the Twelve Colonies and then tears it down, leaving the bewildered survivors to try to escape and build a new life for themselves.

It's not the series at its best - the first episode of Season 1 and thus the next episode after this, 33, may hold that honour - but it does set up the show well and leave you wanting to watch more.

Blake's 7: The Way Back

Aired 2 January 1978

In the late 1970s, veteran TV writer Terry Nation was called in to a meeting at the BBC to discuss creating a new show. A respected writer with a huge amount of experience in the industry, he was still best-known for creating the Daleks for Doctor Who fifteen years earlier, and the BBC were hoping to tap that magic again. Nation had several ideas for crime dramas and other ideas, but the executives he was talking to seemed underwhelmed. Improvising on the spot, Nation suggested a dystopian space opera, with a band of malcontents and criminals reluctantly joining forces to escape a tyrannical government. He left with a commission to write a pilot.

Blake's 7 was developed as a conscious riposte to the relentless optimism of Star Trek; the symbol of the despotic Terran Federation is that of Star Trek's Federation but turned to the extreme right. Nation decided he didn't want to write a children's show, and instead wrote an adult, tough and at times brutal pilot script in which engineer Roj Blake is taken to a clandestine meeting of rebels against the government and learns that he was once a respected military leader, captured by the Federation and mind-wiped to be turned into a model citizen. Blake is horrified and suffers a mild mental breakdown as his real memories come flooding back. His new associates are killed in a massacre and Blake finds himself on trial on trumped-up charges of child molestation. His lawyers discover the truth and embark on a quest to clear Blake's name...with invariably fatal results. Only at the end of the episode does Blake meet some of his other soon-to-be fellow shipmates (Jenna and Vila; Avon doesn't appear until the second episode), as he is carried away from Earth on a transport, vowing to return to destroy the government.

The Way Back is uncompromising and quite astonishingly cynical, landing in tone somewhere between Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Prisoner and a waking nightmare, and light-years from the cowboy theatrics of the then recently-released movie Star Wars. It has money problems - Blake's 7 was commissioned as a replacement for contemporary crime drama Softly Softly: Task Force and given the exact same budget! - but these are mostly overcome by cunning use of industrial wastelands and locations as sets and some quite excellent model work. What remains overwhelmingly impressive is the bleak atmosphere and superb acting, particularly from Gareth Thomas as Blake. Not just a great pilot episode, this is one of the best episodes of the entire series.

Doctor Who: An Unearthly Child

Aired 23 November 1963

The day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the BBC started broadcasting a very unusual drama series. Commissioned as a stopgap between the Saturday sports coverage and an evening pop music show, Doctor Who was a show that combined elements of historical drama, science fiction and educational show. Its long list of creators (Sydney Newman, Anthony Coburn, C.E. Webber, Donald Wilson, Verity Lambert and David Whittaker all played a role in development) shows it was a tough concept to translate to screen, but eventually they succeeded and filmed a pilot episode.

Unfortunately, the pilot episode was a failure. The direction was off, the actors fluffed their lines several times and bits of the set broke off during filming. Unusually (because of the considerable expense), the BBC took the step of mounting a full re-shoot of the pilot, along with a partial rewrite of the script to make the characters more relatable. This time, the team hit it out of the park, crafting a remarkable 25-minute science fiction mystery series that would ultimately launch a franchise that would run for fifty-six years (and counting).

An Unearthly Child sees Coal Hill School teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright becoming concerned about the welfare of one of their students, Susan Foreman, who is quite astonishingly bright and intelligent about somethings (like science and maths) but astoundingly ignorant about others. They are bewildered to discover that she lives with her grandfather in what appears to be a junkyard. Her grandfather, who answers only to the title "Doctor," tries to escape their attention by taking refuge in a police telephone box, but the teachers follow him inside only to discover it is in fact a camouflaged space/time machine, a TARDIS. Shenanigans ensure in which they also learn that both the Doctor and Susan are aliens, exiles from another world, before the TARDIS malfunctions and carries them away from Earth, beginning an adventure that will last a long, long time.

The first episode of Doctor Who has many of the ingredients of later episodes, including a mystery and dramatic revelations, but this time they're about the Doctor himself. This was the first time people had encountered the character, or the TARDIS, and in many cases the very idea of time travel. With some impressive sets (by 1963 BBC standards), good writing and an off-beat atmosphere, not to mention a superlative performance by William Hartnell (the Doctor), which is somewhere between stern and outright threatening, An Unearthly Child sets the scene for all that has followed since.

The Expanse: Dulcinea

Aired 23 November 2015

Bringing James S.A. Corey's series of space opera novels to the screen was always going to be a big challenge, but it's one that the team at Alcon Entertainment rose to with a relish. Dulcinea introduces the setting of the 23rd Century Solar system as vividly as Ron Moore introduced the world of the Twelve Colonies in Battlestar Galactica a dozen years earlier. The attention to detail is amazing, from the lighter gravity in the asteroid settlements to the way the crewmembers of ships not under thrust have to float in zero-g. More important are the actors, with Thomas Jane as a world-weary detective and Steven Strait as the idealistic would-be hero who puts his life (and those of others) on the line to do what he considers to be right.

The result is a vivid and immediately-impactful vision of the future, and a show that starts already in fifth gear and only accelerates from there. Stunning visuals (the effects team on the show deserve all the plaudits for their clear, detailed style, and to be frank the guys creating the murky, often barely-discernible CG on Star Trek: Discovery could learn a lot from them), some excellent music and some terrific directing (the opening imagery of Julie Mao on her terror-stricken ship is now iconic) help propel the story onwards.

The Expanse is the best space opera show since - and possibly including - Battlestar Galactica and this first episode is an important part of the reason why. Remember the Cant!

Firefly: Serenity

Aired 20 December 2002

Serenity was the first episode of Firefly to be written and shot, but it was not the first to be broadcast: Fox felt the episode was low on action and pace, so they ordered Joss Whedon to create a punchier opening (resulting in The Train Job) and moved this premiere to later in the run. Of course, as this episode was the one that established what the hell was going on and introduced the characters and premise, this didn't do much but leave viewers extremely confused and switching off in their droves, leading a few weeks later to the show's cancellation.

This was a huge shame (understatement) as Serenity - not to be confused with the movie of the same name - is a splendid pilot, the best Joss Whedon has ever written. It sets up both the world and the worldview of its characters, introduces a relatively large cast and establishes a significant mystery that will run across the season. It also has to tell rollicking good story in its own right, which it does with enviable skill.

Whilst it's hard to pinpoint one reason why Firefly failed, taking it's excellent opening two hours and burying them at the end of the first season probably had a key role to play.

Lost: Pilot

Aired 22 September 2004

Costing almost $15 million, the pilot episode to Lost is still the most expensive TV pilot ever filmed. To sell the crash-landing of Oceanic Flight 815 on a remote island in the South Pacific, ABC shipped a broken-up Lockheed L-1011 to Hawaii, scattered bits of it along a beach and then, after several weeks of shooting, had to carefully remove it again. It was absurdly indulgent, but every second of the expense ends up on screen, resulting in a scene of chaos, explosions and people trying to save one another that grabbed the audience and didn't let up.

J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof's script is intriguing, setting up no less than fourteen regular characters (and several more recurring) and establishing almost all of them with some interesting character work before later episodes would do the heavy lifting of fleshing them all out via flashbacks. Excellent acting and fantastic location shooting in Hawaii added up to that rarest of things, a network TV show that looked as expensive as premium cable.

Lost's pilot shows the value of starting your show with a bang, grabbing the audience's attention, and then not letting it go.

Mr. Robot: eps1.0_hellofriend.mov

Aired 24 June 2015

Mr. Robot began life as a movie script by Sam Ismail which he developed for some time before realising that the story was too big and the characters bursting past the page count, demanding more material. Ismail reframed the two-hour movie as a ten-hour season of television, with the pilot expanding from the first thirty pages of the script.

Mr. Robot's pilot is remarkable, an intense drama blending psychology, hacking, cyberthriller and drama. Rami Malek is perfectly cast as Eliot Alderson, a man suffering from depression and loneliness who relates to people by hacking them online, even his therapist. In doing so he finds out secrets about them that they don't even know, and is able to influence their lives without them ever knowing.

Mr. Robot's pilot also has unusual rewatch value. You can watch it on the surface as the technothriller it comes across as, but after watching Season 1 you can go back with fresh information and see all the events again in a different light. A remarkable opening episode to a very unique-feeling series.

Red Dwarf: The End

Aired 15 February 1988

"Everybody's dead, Dave." The very first episode of Red Dwarf sets up a very strong premise, with Dave Lister, the lowest-ranking crewmember on the five-mile-long mining ship Red Dwarf (because the service robots have a better union than the human maintenance crew), being sentenced to spend the rest of the mission in temporal stasis after smuggling an unquarantined cat on board. This proves unexpectedly helpful when the crew is wiped out by a lethal radiation leak. Holly, the ship's AI (IQ 6,000, "the same as 12,000 traffic wardens"), steers the ship into deep space and waits for the radiation to die down to a safe background level...which takes 3 million years.

Emerging from stasis, Lister discovers his only company is the now-senile Holly, a humanoid lifeform who descended from his pregnant cat and a holographic recreation of Lister's commanding office, the painfully officious and unpleasant Arnold J. Rimmer.

It's a great premise which gets the show off to a good start (arguably the second episode, Future Echoes, is also required viewing as it sets up how the show can move beyond its limited premise), showcases the amazing cast and features some good gags. A 31-year (and counting) journey started here.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Emissary

Aired 3 January 1993

Deep Space Nine is almost certainly the finest Star Trek television series for myriad reasons, from its greater levels of serialisation to its intricate character arcs to its refusal to push the reset button at the end of each episode, but one that is oft-overlooked is the fact that it has the best opening episode in the entire franchise.

The Cage was so esoteric and weird that it put the broadcasters off and nearly killed the original Star Trek, before it came back with the (somewhat) stronger and mostly-recast second pilot Where No Man Has Gone Before; the broadcasters were still unconvinced and ended up dropping in a random early Season 1 episode to kick things off instead. Star Trek: The Next Generation's Encounter at Farpoint was intriguing but clumsily-written, with the characters pale shadows of their later, more fleshed-out incarnations. Voyager's Caretaker was only okay, and Enterprise's Broken Bow started off well by promising a more low-tech approach to Star Trek that it had pretty much broken by the end of the pilot. Discovery took arguably three whole episodes to even finish off setting up its basic premise.

Emissary, though, is a much more successful episode. It opens with a literal bang, with producer Michael Piller finally apologising to fans for having to wimp out on showing the Battle of Wolf 359 from The Next Generation's Borg epic The Best of Both Worlds three years earlier (due to cost). An epic flashback depicts the desperate struggle as the Borg cut through a Starfleet armada of forty starships with contemptuous ease, Commander Ben Sisko losing his wife in the process.

The rest of the episode is fascinating. The Cardassians have withdraw their occupation force from the planet Bajor after forty years of brutal conquest, leaving massive religious and social upheavals in their wake. The Federation has stepped in to help the transition and run an orbiting Cardassian space station, but to the surprise of the Starfleet personnel, they find a hostile reception among those Bajorans who fear they've swapped one oppressor for another. It's all rather messy and a big departure from The Next Generation, where everyone is so civilised and reasonable and solves problems over cups of (Earl Grey, hot) tea and sessions with the ship's counsellor. The fact that the main cast includes a significant number of both Starfleet and non-Starfleet personnel (a first and, to date, last for the franchise) allows for more character and cultural conflict than we'd previously seen on Trek, and fuelled seven full (and mostly excellent) seasons of stories.

The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye

Aired 31 October 2010

The Walking Dead has become such a divisive and polarising show, that it's easy to forget how well-received the first episode (and most of the first season) was. Directed by Frank Darabont (that's Mr. Shawshank Redemption to you and me), the opening episode is a masterclass in slowly building tension and character interplay, particularly the exchanges between Rick and Morgan (so effective that Morgan would return to the series years later by popular fan demand).

The visuals are striking throughout, particularly the closing images of Rick riding a horse into an eerily deserted Atlanta, only to be attacked by a vast horde of walkers and forced to take refuge in a tank. It's rare to see a pilot given this level of production value, scripting and direction, and a genuine pleasure to watch.

Of course, Darabont would be forced off The Walking Dead in -contentious circumstances a year later (with litigation still continuing today), and The Walking Dead would go through so many showrunners, writing staffs and contortions of premise that the show today barely resembles how it started, but this opener remains excellent and compelling viewing.


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Happy 15th Anniversary to BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (2.0)

On 8 December 2003, the Sci-Fi Channel aired a two-part TV movie based on Glen A. Larson's 1978 space opera, Battlestar Galactica. This new show had been preceded by very low expectations: none of the cast or crew of the original show was involved, and two previous reboot pitches which had been direct sequels to the original show had been cancelled in favour of a total remake. Redesigns of iconic ships and vehicles had annoyed the original fanbase, as had the "gender-swapping" of established characters like Starbuck and Boomer. However, early critical reviews were positive and some of the casting for the show, such as Edward James Olmos as the new version of Commander Adama (in the role played by Lorne Green in the original) and Mary McDonnell as the new President of the Colonies, seemed promising.

A promotional image for Battlestar Galactica's third season (2006-07).

The road to relaunching Battlestar Galactica had been a long one. ABC had commissioned Glen A. Larson to create the original show back in 1977, keen to launch on the bandwagon of space opera and impressive visual effects generated by the release of the original Star Wars movie. They even brought in John Dykstra, who had created Star Wars's special effects, to work on the show. Borrowing heavily from Egyptian mythology and Mormon theology, the show told the story of the annihilation of the Twelve Colonies of Man at the hands of a hostile alien race, the Cylons, consisting of cyborg leaders and fully-robotic soldiers. The last surviving human warship, the battlestar Galactica, leads a "ragtag fugitive fleet" in search of the mythical Thirteenth Colony, also known as Earth. Despite schmaltzy acting, the presence of cute kid and animal actors (including the still-bizarre decision to have a chimp playing a robot dog) and whiplash-inducing shifts in tone, the show built up a strong following for its impressive effects and its emphasis on family.

The show launched to enormous ratings, but these fell drastically over the course of the first season. Combined with the show's eye-watering cost, ABC decided to cancel it and resurrect it two years later as Galactica 1980, a much lower-budged show meant more to appeal to kids. Galactica 1980 holds a strong claim to be the worst TV show ever made (with the solitary exception of a flashback episode set during the original series) and was quickly put out of its misery.

The original Battlestar Galactica had spectacular visual effects for 1978 but less impressive scripts.

Larson moved on to other projects, but always felt there was more mileage in the Battlestar concept. Richard Hatch, who'd played Captain Apollo on the original series, agreed, and with Larson's blessing undertook various attempts to relaunch the show. Successful novel and comic series followed through the 1980s and 1990s and in 1998 Hatch produced a proof-of-concept video dubbed Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming. Ignoring Galactica 1980, this would have been a "next generation" concept picking up on the story twenty years later with the Galactica crew still searching for Earth with a whole new generation growing up in the fleet. Despite being popular at fan conventions, the idea did not find fertile ground with a studio. A year later Glen A. Larson started developing a movie concept which would have followed up on the fate of the battlestar Pegasus from the original series, but again this didn't get very far.

A much more serious attempt followed in 2000. Producers Bryan Singer and Tom DeSanto were the hot flavour of the month in Hollywood for the success of their movie X-Men and Singer, a huge fan of the original Battlestar Galactica, was determined to get the show launched again. His concept was similar to Hatch's and would have been a next generation reboot. Fox TV signed on, but were somewhat sceptical that BSG's relatively small fanbase could help propel the show to a larger audience, especially as it was a continuation. Nevertheless, the project moved to within a few weeks production starting (including some early set construction and lots of concept art being produced) when Fox put all new projects on hold in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Fox were slow to get the show moving again, so when Singer and DeSanto left the project to focus on the next X-Men movie, Fox let the idea lapse.

Promotional artwork for Bryan Singer and Tom DeSanto's planned Battlestar reboot (2001).

Universal Pictures, who held the rights to the original BSG, decided to push forwards with a new version of the show themselves. Whilst 9/11 had disrupted Fox's plans, Universal saw it as an opportunity to tell a very different kind of story. Critics of the original BSG - and even some fans - had felt that the original series had massively undersold the darkness and trauma that would have resulted from the destruction of twelve planets and billions of human beings on the survivors. Universal asked producer David Eick to work on ideas for the new series, but the first directive was that this was going to be a page one rewrite and remake set in a new continuity. Eick decided he needed to bring on board someone who really understood science fiction and in particular space opera and brought on board a writer named Ronald D. Moore.

Moore had cut his teeth as a very young writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which he'd joined in 1989 in its third season. He was just about the only staff writer to survive the chaotic third season into the fourth, and became a key creative lead on the show in its latter five seasons. When the show wrapped, he co-wrote the movies Generations and First Contact as well as moving over to Deep Space Nine for its third season, again playing a key creative role on that show. When Deep Space Nine wrapped in 1999, he moved over to Star Trek: Voyager but immediately found a much more restrictive creative environment. Moore was in particular frustrated by the fact that the starship Voyager was still clean and pristine despite being trapped on the other side of the galaxy with very limited chances for resupply. His feeling was that the show should have been darker, more challenging and engaged in more morally murky discussions about the morality of the Federation when a ship was put in a difficult position. The producers disagreed, feeling that cookie-cutter philosophising and constantly hitting a big red reset button at the end of every episode was the way forwards instead. Moore duly quit, going to work first on Roswell at the WB and then Carnivale at HBO.

Executive producer and showrunner Ronald D. Moore on the hanger set of Battlestar Galactica.

He was still working on Carnivale when Eick called. Moore had watched Battlestar when it first aired and seen great promise in it, but had also disliked the campy and sillier elements of the show (such as the cute kids, robots and the "casino planet" in the pilot). He rewatched the pilot movie and realised there was a lot of strength in the basic premise and agreed that it could be reworked in a post-9/11 environment for greater emotional impact. He agreed to write a new pilot for Universal's subsidiary, the Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy). This ballooned into a (relatively) high-budget three-hour mini-series which could also work as a backdoor pilot for a full series.

Moore penned the pilot and oversaw some elements of production, including exercising his desire for a slightly darker aesthetic than Star Trek and to have a completely new (for SF) way of shooting the action with handheld cameras, even the space scenes. Director Michael Rymer immediately locked into what Moore was thinking of and his directorial style immediately became a hallmark of the show. Moore also wanted a more understated and less symphonic way of doing music for a space series and lucked out when Richard Gibbs also picked up that idea and ran with it. A young composer named Bear McCreary also assisted Gibbs on the pilot.

Edward James Olmos as Commander William Adama and Mary McDonnell as President Laura Roslin.

Casting proved interesting but controversial. Moore wanted distinct actors with gravitas and experience, but was aware that it was very unusual for producers to get their first choices. In this case, he wanted Edward James Olmos for Adama and Mary McDonnell for Roslin and was flabbergasted when both said yes, sold on the quality of the scripts. The casting department also scored a steady series of successes when they found a lot of fresh young talent for the series, from Jamie Bamber for Apollo to James Callis for Baltar and, most iconically, Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck and former model Tricia Helfer as Caprica Six. Established fans of the show were furious to learn that both Starbuck and Boomer (to be played by Grace Park) had been changed from male characters to a female one for the show and some of the original castmembers agreed with them: Dirk Benedict (who played Starbuck in the original show) scathingly referred to the new character as "Stardoe".

For visual effects, the team at Zoic were called in to produce the huge amount of CGI needed for the mini-series. Zoic had just come off the back of Joss Whedon's newly-cancelled Firefly so the commission was good news for them. The CG team included many veterans of both Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine, who relished on rendering effects on a new, more powerful hardware and having the ability to design lots of new ships, although honouring the designs laid down in the original show.

The Battlestar Galactica mini-series was critically acclaimed on its release. The reviews were excellent across the board, with a lot praise for the actors, direction and acting, and the ratings were very high, setting new records for SyFy. It was an easy choice to commission a full first season, especially once Ron Moore confirmed he would drop Carnivale (which was being torn apart by corporate politics and would be cancelled after its second season) to move over as full-time showrunner. When the first season proper debuted a year later, with 33 (the episode that won the show a Hugo Award), it was even better.

Of course, the show could not quite sustain that early acclaim and eventually went off the rails, but that's another story. Battlestar Galactica did for space-set science fiction what Game of Thrones later did for epic fantasy, making it grittier, more real and more resonant with a wider audience previously dismissive of the art form. It's a shame we haven't seen more shows come along in its wake, but finally, with shows like The Expanse, it seems that promise has come good. Battlestar Galactica remains, despite its declining quality later on, one of the strongest SF TV shows ever made, and essential viewing for any fan of the genre.

Gratuitous Lists: The Ten Best BATTLESTAR GALACTICA Episodes

After seeing this list of the ten best BSG episodes which had some "interesting" choices (the #1 choice, Unfinished Business, is frankly one of the weakest episodes of the series and started the show's most diabolical subplot, the Love Quadrangle of Doom), I thought I'd offer up my own list.

The stories are not presented in any kind of order because the level of quality between these episodes is pretty close, so I'd rather celebrate these episodes rather than get into an argument about rankings. Also, due to BSG's high level of serialisation, it was sometimes a bit of a judgement call on what was a stand-alone episode and what was a multi-part story.

33
Season 1, Episode 1

The first episode of the series proper (after the pilot mini-series) is possibly its finest single hour. A taut, claustrophobic episode which sees the Cylons appear every 33 minutes without fail. The crew, only able to grab micronaps, are run to the edge of exhaustion as they push themselves and their ships to breaking point as they try to stay one step ahead of the Cylons, who are their most faceless, their most relentless and their most terrifying in this episode. Eventually a solution is found, but it requires an immense sacrifice of lives, a decision that goes on to have ramifications through the rest of the series.

This episode also strongly influenced the Star Wars movie The Last Jedi, which borrows some of its plot structure and ideas; writer-director Rian Johnson is a big fan of the second incarnation of BSG. The difference is that 33 is the far stronger piece, its shorter running time and much greater character focus giving the story much more weight than the Star Wars movie.

Pegasus/Resurrection Ship
Season 2, Episodes 10-12

Season 2 of BSG threw a massive curveball at audiences halfway through its second season: a second, much larger and more powerful battlestar shows up and its commanding officer, Admiral Cain, takes command of the fleet. Commander Adama's initial relief at not having to take the big decisions any more turns to disquiet and then disgust as he learns that Cain kept her crew safe by being far more ruthless than he was, summarily executing officers who questioned her authority and mandating the physical and mental abuse of Cylon POWs. As the two battlestars prepare for a massive assault on a Cylon resurrection ship, the two COs find themselves contemplating severe measures to keep the other ship in line.

The result is a tense game of psychological cat and mouse, with Michelle Forbes absolutely outstanding in the role of Admiral Cain. The three-part story also plays fair by showing why Cain made the decisions she did (even better exemplified in the later TV movie Razor) and her more ruthless attitude is shown to have some benefits, although it is also shown at having severe drawbacks. The three-parter has what might also be Bear McCreary's best work on the show's score, with "Prelude to War" and "Roslin & Adama" being arguably the single finest pieces he created for the show. I also have to mention Tricia Helfer's outstanding work as both Six and Gina, the tortured Cylon POW, and James Callis bringing a surprisingly human amount of compassion to the role of Baltar as he tries to help them both. Plus we get an impressive space battle as well.

Downloaded
Season 2, Episode 18

For the first time in late Season 2, the show reoriented itself as a drama about the Cylons, artificial intelligences who gained freedom from the creators who brutally enslaved them and then took their revenge. The episode follows Caprica Six and Boomer as they try (badly) to readjust to life in Cylon society after spending years infiltrating the humans, with Eight (a flawless Lucy Lawless) acting as their mentor, only to quickly turn on them when it becomes clear that they've been "corrupted" by human values.

The result is another game of psychological cat-and-mouse as Six and Boomer realise what Eight is up to and work together to overcome her and bring a different kind of message to the Cylons, that they can work and live with humans after all. What could have been a throwaway experimental episode ends up as the catalyst for the biggest change in the show's premise and paradigm to date.

Kobol's Last Gleaming
Season 1, Episodes 12-13

The Season 1 BSG finale is a masterclass in how to take the story pieces that have been put in place slowly over the previous dozen episodes and use them to tell a gripping, intense story that works on an action level (a Cylon basestar needs to be destroyed after it shoots down a Colonial survey team, leaving them stranded on a planetary surface) as well as a character-based one, with Adama and Roslin's simmering, season-long political strife erupting in open conflict with Lee not sure which way to jump.

The story also follows a second storyline back on Caprica, as Helo and Starbuck are finally reunited and Starbuck gets into an old-fashioned throwdown with Six. And just when you think the story can't get any better we get that gutshot of an ending which is still shocking a decade and a half later. Arguably, this was the story where BSG proved it had the legs to run for many years and tell a lot of different stories.

Exodus
Season 3, Episodes 3-4

The "New Caprica" story arc was always a little muddled - its use of Iraq War and War on Terror imagery always felt a bit more sensationalist than actually trying to say anything of value about those conflicts - but as a story it was much more gripping. The resolution of that story in Exodus can be accused of contrivance (far more people escape from New Caprica than is realistic) but it's nevertheless fantastic.

First off, we have the "atmo-drop", probably the most satisfying, "Hell yeah!" moment out of the entire show. This is followed by the mother of all space battles which is barely survived by our heroes (not really "won"). We then have the character-based drama, with the most heartbreaking scene in the entire series as Tigh confronts his wife over her betrayal of the resistance, and later on his return to Galactica in what should be his moment of triumph, only for Adama to realise his friend is an utterly broken and shattered man and it will be some time before he even starts to recover. McCreary's score and the CGI team also absolutely kill it.

Exodus, Part 2 is also arguably the end of the show's golden age, when every episode (okay, apart from Black Market and Sacrifice) had been good-to-excellent and the show had been constantly inventive, thought-provoking and intelligent. After this episode, things got a fair bit inconsistent, although it was still capable of producing occasionally outstanding episodes.

Revelations/Sometimes a Great Notion
Season 4, Episodes 10-11

For a while it looked like BSG was going to be cancelled halfway through its fourth season, mainly due to the 2008 Writer's Guild of America Strike halting filming. It was touch and go but eventually SyFy okayed them finishing the season off. Which is both good - without it we wouldn't have gotten the mutiny arc - and bad, as most of the rest of the season was weak and the series finale was muddled, confused and incoherent in terms of character, plot and theme. If the series had been cancelled, than Sometimes a Great Notion, the final episode shot before the break, would have been the series finale. If it had been, BSG would probably be talked about now as the greatest (if bleakest) SF series ever made.

The mid-season two-parter is a tense, taut affair. The identities of the Final Five Cylons have been flushed out into the open, the rebel Cylons and their erstwhile human allies are at loggerheads over the fate of the Five and Starbuck is on the verge of discovering the location of Earth. In the Revelations cliffhanger the day is saved and Earth, which our protagonists have been looking for for four years and rested all their hopes and dreams in, is finally located...only for it to turn out to be a blasted, nuked-out ruin. The second part somehow goes even darker, with widespread despair gripping the fleet, one of the main characters choosing to commit suicide (literally blowing her brains out rather than face yet another search for a new home, in possibly the show's single most shocking and unexpected death) and a series of shocking discoveries about the planet, the Thirteenth Colony and the Cylons rocking our very understanding of what the hell the show is even about. There's also some dark humour to be mined by seeing the supposedly enigmatic and wise Leoben being confronted by a genuinely bizarre mystery and promptly freaking out.

Dark, bleak and grim, but also hauntingly atmosphere and beautifully-shot, if this had been the ending, we'd still be talking about the show in awe-inspired tones even now. Sadly, the finale undoes a lot of the power of this story.

Flesh and Bone
Season 1, Episode 8

BSG was always good at psychological drama and mind-games, and its most powerful relationship in this vein was always between the Cylon Leoben Conoy and Starbuck. It started in Flesh and Bone, an early episode which throws a bit of a curveball at the viewer as the Cylon agent is less interested in killing everyone than he is in gaining Starbuck's understanding. The result is that we learn a lot more about Starbuck and come to understand that she is a fundamentally flawed, broken human being but also one who is capable of changing her mind and her outlook. It's also an under-appreciated moment in Roslin's character development, when we see her true, resolute steel for the first time as she ruthlessly (and perhaps a bit too easily) makes a decision that supposedly strong and morally compromised Starbuck cannot.

The episode also marks the start of the Leoben/Starbuck dynamic that is explored in an even more messed-up fashion in the New Caprica arc and finally resolves in Sometimes a Great Notion, when Leoben finally discovers the true mystery and the puzzle he's been searching for all along...and is so disturbed by it he runs away. Flesh and Bone is the moment BSG confirmed that this story of pragmatic survival and political compromise was also going to have a surrealist and spiritual element to it as well.

The Oath/Blood on the Scales
Season 4, Episodes 13-14

By Season 4's mid-point, BSG had fallen a bit too much in love with its bizarre, religious and spiritual side and its complex and self-contradictory mythology. This two-part story sees the "little people" of the fleet having enough of the mystical mumbo-jumbo and snap (with about half the viewers nodding in approval), staging an armed uprising with several main characters joining the mutiny. The result is a story that would have felt at home in Season 1 or 2, with lots of tough moral decisions, interpersonal conflict and some strong action sequences.

It also works very well because the mutineers have a point: giving succour to the Cylon rebels was always going to be an unpopular choice (they did help kill over 20 billion human beings, after all), the impact of the trauma on New Caprica and the discovery of the destruction of Earth had not been properly processed and Roslin was somehow on her second term despite never being elected (and losing the only election she ever stood in).

The two-parter does have a few weaknesses, such as some very out-of-character behaviour for Tom Zarak (to Richard Hatch's fully-justified and vocal displeasure) and a resolution that may have been satisfying on an action level but did nothing to address the core and real concerns of the people who backed the mutiny. But otherwise this late-run BSG episode escapes the mediocrity that plagued the show's endgame and gave us a great throwback to the early running of the show.

Lay Down Your Burdens
Season 2, Episodes 19-20

The BSG Season 2 finale does a lot of great things. It brings on board the mighty Dean Stockwell as the effective Cylon leader John Cavil. It has a great action story as Starbuck leads a rescue mission back to Caprica to save Sam Anders and his rebel group. It also has an effective subplot as the PTSD-suffering Cylon ex-POW Gina has to decide how she is going to take revenge on the people who mentally and sexually abused her for months.

There's a lot going on even before the fleet discovers the inhabitable planet of New Caprica, hidden inside a nebula. The fleet is in the middle of an election campaign, with President Roslin expected to comfortably curb-stomp Gaius Baltar. But the discovery of New Caprica and Baltar's insistence that they could settle on New Caprica and take a break from their relentless stress and toil throws the campaign into an uproar, with several characters considering the morality of rigging the election to ensure the "right" person wins.

BSG was always at its best when it mixed religion, politics, action and character development, and in this story it throws everything into the blender. What comes out is one of the show's most memorable moments, when it jumps forward one year in an instant and shows the catastrophic consequences of our characters' decisions before ending on the mother of all cliffhangers.

Razor
TV Movie (airing between Seasons 3 and 4)

It was a toss-up here between Razor and the original mini-series, which did a great job of setting up the show's premise and introducing this band of crazy, messed-up people (humans and androids both). However, the mini is perhaps a little overlong and isn't quite up to the standards that came later on. Razor, on the other hand, works on quite a few levels.

It's a stand-alone story focusing on the new character of Kendra Shaw (a great performance by Stephanie Jacobson). Flashbacks show her joining the crew of the Pegasus just before the Fall of the Twelve Colonies. We see events previously only alluded to in dialogue occurring in real-time and we learn more about Cain, Gina and the other crewmembers on Pegasus, along with plenty of space battles and personal combat. There's also a present-day story following the Galactica and Pegasus as they try to track down an ancient Cylon vessel from the First Cylon War that is posing a threat to the fleet.

There's also a great shout-out to the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica, when we get to meet the original Cylons and see the original baseships and Raiders in action. Neo-BSG always had an awkward relationshp with its much cheesier and less-accomplished forebear, so it's good to see them acknowledging the debt and inspiration from the original show here (even if it does prove that preventing the robotic Cylons from talking was a great move).

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Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock

The Twelve Colonies of Kobol have constructed robotic servitors, the Cylons, to work as servants, soldiers...and slaves. The Cylons have rebelled, constructed a significant fleet and launched a series of attacks against the divided Colonies. The Colonial Fleet has been constructed to meet the threat, but they continue to bicker amongst themselves. It falls to the officers of the Fleet to lead the defence of the Twelve Colonies against a remorseless and relentless foe.

The rebooted Battlestar Galactica TV series ran for four seasons, a mini-series and two TV movies between 2003 and 2009. A remake of a cheesy late 1970s show, it featured (for the first two-and-a-bit seasons anyway) outstanding acting, superb and nuanced writing and some fantastic, spectacular space battles. It's surprising that we haven't seen a video game based on the series before, given its gritty complexity and the fact that the mythos are rich in different possibilities for gameplay, not to mention there's a very well-received board game based on the series already. The only previous official game for the setting was a low-key Facebook MMO.

It's therefore a bit random to see an official video game show up eight years after the TV show ended, although the fact it's from a tiny Australian studio and a small British publisher with limited budgets may explain that. Normally you wouldn't be expecting much from a game developed in apparently a small period of time (it was announced less than a year ago), on clearly a very tight budget, from niche companies. It's thus a pleasure to say that Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is excellent, a hybrid of XCOM and Homeworld with a great storyline and lots of excellent adherence to the established lore whilst bringing in new ideas.

Deadlock is a two-tier game with a grand strategic layer and a tactical combat mode. The strategy layer shows a map of the Twelve Colonies on which you can build new ships, assemble new fleets, research new ships and weapons and make sure you're keeping the Colonies happy (leave a Colony under attack for too long and they'll withdraw from the Articles of Colonisation, along with their funding, a bit like XCOM). When one of your fleets meets a Cylon force, the game shifts to a Homeworld-style 3D battle map. You move your ships, launch fighters, select what weapons to use and can distribute power on each ship, boosting weapons power or hardening your computer systems to stop the Cylons hacking them. You can also recruit Colonial officers and level them up, which grants you special abilities in battle (such as being able to better resist Cylon infiltration squads if you give your commander the Marine Tactics specialisation) and allows you to bring more ships to an engagement.

The space battles are fought using the WEGO system, where both sides give orders and then the orders unfold simultaneously. This means you not only have to choose what to do, you have to take into account what the enemy may do on their side and anticipate accordingly. Each ship on each side has different capabilities, armour, speed and defences and as the campaign continues you have to learn the best way of using your ships and their abilities. Early battles, fought with the speedy, missile-laden but lightly-armoured Manticore-class gunboats and the more formidable Adamant-class frigates, tend to be fast and furious. Later battles, fought with Jupiter-class battlestars (like the Galactica) against Cylon basestars, are slower, more strategic and have many more options, with you having to decide to close to close range to use your railguns or stand off at long range and exchange missile barrages, timing when to use a flak barrage to take down an enemy missile volley whilst not blowing up your own ordinance or fighters by accident.

Slightly disappointingly, there isn't an open, Total War-style campaign where you can go from a lowly starting fleet to outright victory at your own pace; the game only covers the first few months of the Cylon War (out of twelve years), so ends with a major strategic victory, not the outright defeat of the enemy. Instead the game has a series of important "story" missions, which unlock new units and technology. You can choose to delay these missions to take on optional side-battles and build up more resources but the war doesn't move on until you do the campaign missions. Rushing these missions is a bad idea (particularly in the early game, where you want to start building up multiple fleets as early as possible) since you'll get overwhelmed quickly, so there's a strong judgement call to be made in when to trigger the next story mission and ramp up the difficulty and when to hold back to stockpile more tylium ore and requisition points for later developments. This is more like XCOM and works pretty well, but does reduce the scope for replayability.


The game's storyline is excellent, matching what we know of the lore whilst also introducing new elements. The presentation is slick - the graphical interface is very true to the TV show, the strategy map uses a big table and models just like the battle planning on the TV show and the Bear McCreary-ish music is outstanding - but there are moments when the lack of budget shines through. The voice acting is variable and the dialogue can be a little hammy. The late-game introduction of a Cylon character also feels a bit random, although it does change things up when battles are threatening to get a bit repetitive.

There are a few other niggles. Having to manually launch each Viper squadron from each ship can be a bit mind-numbing, especially when you get to the late game when you might have eight or nine squadrons in battle. A command to order all of your fighters around as one unit would be welcome (something Black Lab Games are looking at for a future patch). There's also occasional difficulty spikes which the game doesn't do a very good job of explaining or advising on how to overcome them. I kept getting annihilated when the missile-spamming basestars showed up until I realised that the flak cannons on battlestars can shoot down missiles as well as Cylon Raiders. It also feels like targeting and firing missiles and selecting which ship to focus fire on all involve at least one or two more mouse clicks than should be really necessary. As a turn-based game, none of these are critical issues and all commands in the game have keyboard shortcuts which make things a lot smoother.

Ultimately, Deadlock is both a great strategy game and a great BSG game, with lots of authentic flavour. Far superior to last year's Warhammer 40,000 space game (Battlefleet Gothic: Armada), Deadlock may in fact be the finest space tactics game since Homeworld 2's release fourteen years ago.

Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock (****) is that most welcome of games, a title that arrived with little fanfare and turns out to be excellent. The tactics are fiendish and compelling, the strategic layer adds some extra freedom to the game, the presentation is first-rate and the story is well-done. Some questionable voice acting and a few UI niggles do make the game slightly more labourious to play than it should be, but so far the developers have done a good job of patching out issues based on feedback so these may improve. The game ends with ten years of the war left to fight, and I would more than welcome an expansion or sequel further exploring this time period.

Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is available on PC now via Steam. Versions for the PlayStation 4 and X-Box One should follow in the next few weeks.

RIP Richard Hatch

Richard Hatch, an actor and writer best-known for his work on the Battlestar Galactica franchise, has passed away at the age of 71 from complications related to pancreatic cancer.

Born in 1945 in Santa Monica, California, Richard Hatch began acting in the Los Angeles Repertory Theatre in the 1960s. He broke into television in 1970 with a regular role on the soap opera All My Children. He left after two years and became a reliable guest star, appearing in TV shows such as Cannon, The Waltons and Hawaii Five-O. In 1976 he gained some acclaim and notice for his season-long recurring role on The Streets of San Francisco.

In 1978 he played the role of Captain Apollo in Glen A. Larson's space opera Battlestar Galactica. He played the serious straight man to Dirk Benedict's more flamboyant Lt. Starbuck, setting up a strong leading man double act. Hatch identified with the character strongly, as well as the epic story Larson was trying to tell. He was bitterly disappointed when the show was cancelled despite very strong ratings and declined to return for the heavily-derided, low-budget spin-off Galactica 1980.

Hatched continued to appear as a recurring guest star throughout the 1980s on shows such as Dynasty, Santa Barbara and Fantasy Island. In the 1990s he turned his attention back to Battlestar Galactica. Glen A. Larson had struck the terrible Galactica 1980 from the canon and planned a comeback series which would feature Apollo, and thus Hatch, in a leading role (effectively replacing his character's father, Commander Adama, after the death of actor Lorne Greene in 1987). Hatch wrote or co-wrote seven Battlestar Galactica novels in support of this effort.

In 1999 Hatch financed a trailer called Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming as a proof-of-concept for a revival of the show. Universal, who then held the rights, decided to reject both The Second Coming and a pitch by Larson focusing on the missing Battlestar Pegasus for a complete, fresh reboot project from Star Trek writer Ronald D. Moore. The rebooted Battlestar Galactica launched with a TV mini-series in 2003 before becoming an ongoing series lasting from 2004 to 2009.

Unlike co-star Dirk Benedict, who was critical of the show's diverse casting and the recasting of his role with a female actress (Katee Sackhoff, whom Benedict later admitted was good in the role and met her for a coffee and photo-op in, appropriately, Starbuck's), Hatch was more open-minded about the reboot. To his surprise, he was offered a role in the series in the recurring role of former terrorist-turned politician Tom Zarek. Relishing the character, who was multi-faceted and complex, Hatch committed to the role and appeared in all four seasons of the ongoing show. He was written out in the final season, but criticised some of his character's final decisions as being uncharacteristic and bizarre (a view echoed by many critics), a shame after the much more nuanced portrayal of the character in the first three seasons.

Subsequent to his final appearance on BSG in 2009, Hatch created a new space opera franchise called The Great War of Magellan, consisting of a roleplaying game and comic book. He also appeared in the Star Trek fan film Prelude to Axanar as a Klingon general and was due to reprise the role in the full-length follow-up before this was canned by CBS and Paramount's legal department.

Richard Hatch was notable for his strong involvement with fandom and winning fan support for attempting to resurrect the Battlestar Galactica franchise. Although his project failed, it certainly helped contribute to the momentum that led to the franchise's return in 2003. Hatch also gave an excellent, layered and nuanced performance as Tom Zarek, a role that challenged him much more than the straightforward hero Apollo of the original series, showing that he was a much more capable actor than perhaps some had first thought. He will certainly be missed.

Battlestar Galactica: Diaspora - Shattered Armistice

Forty years have passed since the First Cylon War, but the Colonial Fleet maintains a strong defence against the potential return of the enemy. Their newest weapon is the Command Navigation Program, an advanced computer system that massively improves warship and fighter response times and efficiency. The fighter wing of the Battlestar Theseus is tasked with testing the program. Thanks to bad - or good - luck and timing, the CNP is not working on the ship and its fighters when the Cylons attack the Twelve Colonies and the battlestar has a fighting chance for survival...

Diaspora: Shattered Armistice is a fan-made space combat game based on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica franchise. It uses the Freespace 2 engine, but you don't need a copy of that game for this to work. In fact, Diaspora is completely free of charge and can be downloaded here.

Fan-made games used to mean "amateurish". Not so with this game. Made over a period of four years, the game features professional-quality audio and voice work, an original musical score and often jaw-dropping visuals (the background skyboxes in particular are fantastic). This game may have the best explosions I've ever seen in a video game. The game also doesn't play as fast and loose with canon as I was expecting. The game casts you as a pilot on the Battlestar Theseus during the Cylon attack on the Twelve Colonies and has you providing cover as the ship attempts to rescue civilian ships from Aerilon whilst the planet burns below (several of these ships end up in the Galactica fleet) and tries to rejoin the main Colonial forces at Virgon for a doomed counter-attack (as mentioned in the mini-series). The Theseus is a new design - borrowing elements from both the Valkyrie and the Pegasus - and a most convincing one. If this had showed up in the series itself, it would have fitted right in.

As space games go, Freespace 2 is, even seventeen years after release, simply the greatest one ever made and it provides an excellent framework for a BSG game. Like the TV show itself, the game does not use Newtonian physics but a sort-of combination of physics and an "aeroplanes in space" model which is actually quite effective. This allows you to do the kind of "turn and burn" moves seen in the TV show and to deactivate your engines and strafe targets by flying on one direction but facing and shooting in another. Combat is both satisfying and dangerous: even the Viper Mk. VII is a relatively fragile craft and the Cylon Raiders are difficult-to-hit targets. You also get to pilot a Raptor on one mission equipped with missile pods and dual miniguns, which is even more fun.

Issues? Well, it's a short game at only six missions (some of them are quite long though), but there is a multiplayer mode which stretches things out. Also, some of the game's damage readings seem buggy. On a mission to disable a Cylon basestar's heavy missile batteries I found my cannons did more damage than heavy bombs, and both other fighters and the Theseus seemed to take down the batteries in seconds whilst my weapons barely scratched it. There's also some occasional stiff movement and animation that betrays the lack of budget and the relatively small team behind it.

But these are pretty minor things (just switch to engaging fighters in the basestar mission), easily made up for by the fact that the game is free and a lot of fun to play. Battlestar Galactica: Diaspora - Shattered Armistice (****) whiles away a few hours very nicely indeed.

The same team are now working on a follow-up, Worthy of Survival, hopefully for release in the near future.

Stellar Cartography: Battlestar Galactica

Over on my other blog, Atlas of Ice and Fire, I've taken a brief break from ASoIaF material to do some Battlestar Galactica-related map posts.

In the first post I look at the cartography of the Twelve Colonies and how you get twelve habitable planets into the same star system.

In the second post I look at the actual voyage of the Galactica and its refugee fleet from the Colonies to Earth, via Kobol, New Caprica, the Ionian Nebula and a host of other landmarks.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA viewing guide

I'm currently rewatching the revamped Battlestar Galactica for the first time in many years. I'm thinking about doing a detailed recap/rewatch for the series later on, if time allows. It's a show whose virtues have certainly become greater over the years but whose flaws have also more notable. Certainly it's a show that's still worth watching, if only to join in on the never-ending debate about the controversial ending.

One of the odder things about the show is that it consists not just of regular episodes and seasons, but also TV movies, online webisodes and spin-offs. The mass of material, and the lack of one easily-available "complete franchise" box set and variable streaming availability has made following the series and watching it more complicated than it really should be. This guide should - hopefully - make the situation clearer:

Production Order

The show's production order is probably the best viewing order as well, since this is the order the series originally aired in and is what most people viewed the series in. This also best protects later spoilers and crucial plot revelations.

Battlestar Galactica

The Mini-Series (2003)
When BSG was rebooted in 2003, it first returned as a pilot mini-series consisting of two 90-minute episodes. This was initially released by itself on DVD. Later on, it was incorporated into the US Season 1 DVD box set but not in the UK Season 1 DVD box set. For UK DVD watchers, the mini-series still has to be purchased separately. The mini-series is included in the Complete Series Blu-Ray set.

Season 1 (2004-05)

• 101: 33
• 102: Water
• 103: Bastille Day
• 104: Act of Contrition
• 105: You Can't Go Home Again
• 106: Litmus
• 107: Six Degrees of Separation 
• 108: Flesh and Bone
• 109: Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down
• 110: The Hand of God
• 111: Colonial Day
• 112: Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part I
• 113: Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II

Season 2 (2005-06)

• 201: Scattered
• 202: Valley of Darkness
• 203: Fragged
• 204: Resistance
• 205: The Farm
• 206: Home, Part I
• 207: Home, Part II
• 208: Final Cut
• 209: Flight of the Phoenix
• 210: Pegasus
• 211: Resurrection Ship, Part I
• 212: Resurrection Ship, Part II
• 213: Epiphanies
• 214: Black Market
• 215: Scar
• 216: Sacrifice
• 217: The Captain's Hand
• 218: Downloaded
• 219: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I
• 220: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II 

Webisodes: The Resistance (2006)
Between Seasons 2 and 3, NBC requested that the BSG team produce ten short "webisodes" to advertise the return of the show. The producers agreed and filmed ten short segments which, when combined, form a 24-minute "prelude" to the third season. However, a legal dispute over pay for the webisodes (which also affected studio-mate series The Office) caused delays in production. As a result, The Resistance was issued only in standard definition (even on the Blu-Ray release) and with a minimum of post-production. However, they do set up the state of play at the start of the third season. They can be found on the American Season 3 DVD release, but not on the UK DVD release. They are included in the Complete Series Blu-Ray set in all territories, however (under the special features for Disc 2 of Season 3).

Season 3 (2006-07)

• 301: Occupation
• 302: Precipice
• 303: Exodus, Part I
• 304: Exodus, Part II
• 305: Collaborators
• 306: Torn
• 307: A Measure of Salvation
• 308: Hero
• 309: Unfinished Business
• 310: The Passage
• 311: The Eye of Jupiter
• 312: Rapture
• 313: Taking a Break From Your Worries
• 314: The Woman King
• 315: A Day in the Life
• 316: Dirty Hands
• 317: Maelstrom
• 318: The Son Also Rises
• 319: Crossroads, Part I
• 320: Crossroads, Part II

TV Movie: Razor (2007)
Produced as a straight-to-DVD special between the third and fourth seasons, Razor was a 90-minute TV movie set towards the end of the second season and expanded on the backstory of the battlestar Pegasus. A series of webisodes set during the First Cylon War preceded Razor, but these have been integrated into the episode itself on the home media releases.

Season 4, Part 1 (2008)

• 401: He That Believeth in Me
• 402: Six of One
• 403: The Ties That Bind
• 404: Escape Velocity
• 405: The Road Less Travelled
• 406: Faith
• 407: Guess What's Coming to Dinner?
• 408: Sine Qua Non
• 409: The Hub
• 410: Revelations

The fourth season of Battlestar Galactica was announced as being the last. However, SyFy delayed transmission of the season by several months due to problems caused by the 2007-08 Writer's Guild of America Strike. They then split the final season in half, airing the two halves a year apart. Although this gave more time for post-production, it caused great irritation in the fanbase.

Webisodes: The Face of the Enemy (2008-09)

These webisodes were produced between the two halves of Season 4. However, due to some slight confusion, they are set between Sometimes a Great Notion and A Disquiet Follows My Soul rather that directly between the two halves of the season. This is because Season 4, Part 2 was originally supposed to end with Sometimes rather than Revelations, but it was decided that Revelations made for a more shocking cliffhanger. Fortunately, the webisodes do not contain any major spoilers for Sometimes. They are not included on either the US or UK DVD sets, but can be found on the Complete Series Blu-Ray set.

Season 4, Part 2 (2009)

• 411: Sometimes a Great Notion
• 412: A Disquiet Follows My Soul
• 413: The Oath
• 414: Blood on the Scales
• 415: No Exit
• 416: Deadlock
• 417: Someone to Watch Over Me
• 418: Islanded in a Stream of Stars
• 419: Daybreak, Part I
• 420: Daybreak, Part II
• 421: Daybreak, Part III

Season 4 was never released as one whole. Instead, the first half was listed as "Season 4" and the second half as "The Final Season" on DVD releases.

TV Movie: The Plan (2010)
The Plan was produced as an attempt to address fan concerns that the Cylons had never actually had "a plan" (as described in the opening to every episode of the first three seasons), and effectively presented everything that happened in the first two seasons from the Cylon POV. However, fan response to the TV movie was muted, especially coming after the conclusion of the series as a whole. The Plan is not part of the Complete Series Blu-Ray set and has to be purchased separately.

 

Caprica

Season 1 (2010)

• 101: Pilot, Part I
• 102: Pilot, Part II
• 103: Rebirth
• 104: Reins of a Waterfall
• 105: Gravedancing
• 106: There is Another Sky
• 107: Know They Enemy
• 108: The Imperfections of Memory
• 109: Ghosts in the Machine
• 110: End of Line
• 111: Unvanquished
• 112: Retribution
• 113: Things We Lock Away
• 114: False Labour
• 115: Blowback
• 116: The Dirteaters
• 117: The Heavens Will Rise
• 118: Here Be Dragons
• 119: Apotheosis

Caprica is a prequel series to BSG, taking place fifty-eight years years prior to the mini-series. It depicts the creation of the Cylons and the sequence of events that led to the First Cylon War. Although cancelled prematurely, an extended coda in the final episode does indicate how the story would have resolved and the war would have started.

Caprica is readily available on DVD, but has not been released properly on Blu-Ray in the UK or USA. Oddly, complete series box sets on Blu-Ray are available from France, Germany and Sweden.


Blood and Chrome (2012)

Blood and Chrome was a proposed second prequel series, taking place sixteen years after the events of Caprica and forty-two before the events of the mini-series. The planned series would have covered the final two years of the First Cylon War. However, the series was never made leaving the pilot as a stand-alone TV movie.

Chronological Order

Watching BSG in chronological order will likely be fairly confusing. BSG is reliant on backstory revelations delivered at key points in the narrative and watching later series and TV movies can result in significant spoilers. Therefore, this is only really recommended as a rewatch experiment.

This is the (rough) show timeline, sans spoilers.

c. 4000 BF (Before the Fall): The Thirteenth Tribe leaves Kobol to colonise Earth. The semi-canon comic book BSG: The Final Five begins.

c. 3600 BF: The Book of Pythia is written.

2000 BF (1,942 years before the events of Caprica): The remaining Twelve Tribes depart Kobol to colonise the Twelve Colonies.

58 BF: Caprica takes place. The epilogue to Season 1 takes place several years later.

52 BF: The First Cylon War begins.

51 BF: The semi-canon video game Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock takes place.

42 BF: Blood & Chrome takes place.

40 BF: The First Cylon War ends. The flashbacks in BSG: Razor take place.

30-20 BF: The flashbacks in BSG: Occupation (episode 201) take place. The semi-canon comic book BSG: The Final Five ends.

c. 6 BF: The flashbacks in BSG: Hero (episode 308) take place. Dialogue in this episode suggest it is more like 1-2 BF, but this was a continuity error.

0: The Fall of the Twelve Colonies. BSG: The Plan begins. BSG: The Mini-Series takes place.

0-1 AF (After the Fall): BSG: Seasons 1-2 and the remainder of The Plan and Razor take place.

2-4 AF: BSG: Seasons 3-4 take place.

The chronological viewing order of the franchise is therefore as follows. I do not recommend you watch the show in this order for a first watch:

1. Caprica
2. Blood & Chrome
3. BSG: The Mini-Series
4. BSG: Seasons 1-2
5. BSG: Razor takes place between Season 2, Episodes 17 and 18.
6. BSG: The Plan takes place betwen the mini-series and Season 2, Episode 20.
7. BSG: The Resistance webisodes
8. BSG: Seasons 3-4 (Part 1)
9. BSG: The Face of the Enemy webisodes
10. BSG: Season 4 (Part 2)

One further thing to consider (alluded to above) is Battlestar Galactica: The Final Five. This is a four-issue comic book written by show scriptwriter Seamus Kevin Fahey. Most of the BSG comics are non-canon, but The Final Five is interesting because it was directly based on the ideas and concepts developed by Ronald D. Moore and the rest of the production team whilst they were planning the final few episodes of the series (particularly the backstory-heavy episode No Exit). This comic book begins over 4,000 years before the rest of the series and tells the story of Kobol, the Thirteenth Tribe, the colonisation of Earth, what happened there and the later activities of the Final Five. Although I would hesitate to take the comic book as canonical, it certainly gives us our best look at what was going on in the deep backstory of the series, as the writers and producers were conceiving it.

In 2017 the video game Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock was released. This was an approved product worked on by some of the team at SyFy who worked on the show, although Ronald D. Moore was not involved. The video game tells the story of the first year or so of the First Cylon War.