Hooked on Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica is Science fiction created by Glen Larson orignaly a TV series screen in 1978, then a sequel on the TV in 1980. A remake was made and aired in 2003 which ran five seasons between 2004 and 2009, some tv movies..Razor in 2007 and The plan in 2009 also a prequel called Caprica in 2010 and some spin offs including Blood & Chrome aired on February 10, 2013. All Battlestar Galactica productions share the premise that in a distant part of our galaxy, a human civilization has extended to a group of planets known as the Twelve Colonies, to which they have migrated from their ancestral homeworld of Kobol. The Twelve Colonies have warred for decades with a cybernetic race known as the Cylons, whose goal is the extermination of the human race. The Cylons offer peace to the humans, which proves to be a ruse. With the aid of a human named Baltar , the Cylons carry out a massive attack on the Twelve Colonies and on the Colonial Fleet of starships that protect them. These attacks devastate the Colonial Fleet, lay waste to the Colonies, and virtually destroy their populations. Scattered survivors flee into outer space aboard available spaceships. Of the entire Colonial battle fleet, only the Battlestar Galactica, a gigantic battleship and spacecraft carrier (analogous to an aircraft carrier), appears to have survived the Cylon conflagration. Under the leadership of Commander Adama, the Galactica and the pilots of "Viper" fighters lead a fugitive fleet of survivors in search of the fabled thirteenth colony known as Earth.

The remake (which I own on Blu-Ray, all 5 seasons on 20 discs ,well techinacaly its 4 sessons and the final sesson which is another 10 episodes of sesson 4) is especially good. The writers superbly weave in politics, religion, action, and excellent character work, bringing together an outstanding company of actors. Some of the characters in BSG are terrifically portrayed (the Commander and his number two, the President, the utterly nuts scientist chap), though perhaps too many of the human survivors appear to be twenty-something Californians (yes, I realise that some are English). Special effects are faultless and there's a well-handled mix of personal drama with that epic space shooting stuff. You don't need to be a fan of Sci-Fi to become engrossed in this - It really is that good. There are no aliens in BSG, but there are artificially intelligent robots (Cylons), who have evolved into exact physical copies of humans. As the episodes go by, more of them are revealed (to a total of 12 models), but we start out with two - one of whom is living on Battlestar Galactica and is unaware of what she is - another of whom appears as a hallucination in the head of a main character. There is space travel, but in a stroke of genius by the creators of this series, everything apart from weapons and engines is lower tech than the average viewer's house - telephones are on wires, computer screens are very basic, there is no techno babble (you'll very quickly pick up that FTL = Faster Than Light and DRADIS = RADAR and that's it).

If you were a fan of the original series, you need to know that this is a re-imagining of the story - hence character names are re-used in different contexts, different genders, different relationships. Starbuck is a woman. Get over it. You will often hear the phrase "this has all happened before and it will all happen again" - which starts out as a nod to the original series, but later comes to mean something different entirely. This is not the original BSG - it is darker and has some very heavy storylines - and rather than compare two things that aren't as alike as you might think, it's best to simply appreciate their differences.