As we approach the fourth and final season of the TV series Battlestar Galactica, based on the 1978 cult Sci-Fi series of the same name, and with the recent release of the excellent Razor, it is worth stating how surprisingly addictive this modern version is. I can’t remember ever following a TV series for three years in a row, but that is exactly what I have been doing with Galactica, even though I initially got into it somewhat reluctantly, assuming that modern television, which I have come to associate for the most part with trash TV, could not possibly deliver on the promise of the original series, and to a larger extent, could not, week after week, year after year, provide intelligent Sci-Fi.

But Galactica has done just that. There have been many moments when the different style and vision of a new director became too obvious and created a disjunction in the viewing experience and, in some cases, resulted in quite boring episodes, but overall, the series has been consistently solid, entertaining and clever.

Being the cynic that I am, I spent the first few episodes listing all the inconsistencies I could find (and there were many) and why certain things such as fashion, books, pens, products designs, allergies, cancer, city architecture, and much more, all looked and felt so terribly 20th century. A civilization that has mastered the ability to build ships that travel across space but that still writes with pens, uses notebooks and can’t find a cure for breast cancer…At that point, I felt that the problem with Galactica was that it failed where so many Sci-Fi films or series have failed before…it failed to effectively and convincingly create the world that it is supposed to create. Whether for budget reasons or for wanting to keep the viewers in an area of familiarity, or simply, for lack of trying, Galactica uses a large number of current human metaphors, traditions, and habits to portray a world that exists far into the future (or into the past)….but that world should in fact look nothing like today’s world. A civilisation that is capable of building faster-than-light ships, a civilisation that split a long time ago from the civilisation that lived on earth, so long ago in fact that new myths have had time to develop, would dress, eat, behave, live, and possibly even look very different from the way we do today.

But I suppose only Sci-Fi nerds like myself would let that bother them, and in all fairness, I fully realize that sustaining a TV series for 4 years without making these types of mistakes would require a higher budget and/or an increasing reliance on animation and, ultimately, the series would probably end up with a much smaller audience due to a lack of familiar, earth-like, frames of reference.

Despite these initial concerns, I found myself slowly captivated and sucked into this world that adroitly combines human and personal stories with larger issues that draw on current events (torture, war, terrorism, tolerance, politics, genetics….) that also seem fairly plausible as potential issues for the future; well, for the near future at least, since if one looks seriously deep into the future, one would expect some of these issues to be resolved, or at least, to have taken on a very different meaning.
Most of the characters are well developed and cast, and each episode (with the occasional exception) has at its core a strong storyline that offers its own rewards but rarely seems disjointed from the overall and consistent thread of the series.

In the end, it is refreshing and pleasing to see a Sci-Fi TV series being handled with such genuineness and earnest. Battlestar Galactica has definitively done its bit towards restoring credibility to televised Sci-Fi and to Sci-Fi in general.