Battlestar Galactica: Litmus

Gotta say it, of all the new shows on television Battlestar Galactica is my current favorite. I grew up watching Apollo and Starbuck fly through the stars so I was glued to this when it appeared (christ, I even watched that series with the gimps on flying bikes traveling back to world war two) but it's more than just nostalgia, it's damn fine television.

The series has dumped together a lot of recent ideas from genre television; the quality writing of early Buffy and Alias, the near silent and strange space scenes from Firefly and even the imaginary friend from Farscape (though it doesn't have that shows wonderful humour). All these elements are layered over a quality cast and mixed in with a sauce dripping in desperation, misery and crumbling machinery. The result is a show that seems so closely aimed at what I like it may as well have been dragged out of my head. The pilot was great, though the evil blonde bits dragged, and the ending set the series perfectly - Almos was a star in the West Wing and he's the soul of the show here, if this quality keeps up no one will even remember him, resplendent in bad trunks, watching the tide drift away on Miami Vice. He has continued to perfect just the right balance of the general and the father to keep you hooked.

Last week's episode was a great bit of 'old' Galactica combined with the new show - wiggled wings and organic space ships - but this week is all about the new with cloned terrorists sparking a witch hunt for evil Cyclons. Combine this with the plot in ground zero finally starting to go somewhere and you have a great episode of a new show, as opposed to a great homage.

From the opening moments everything is pretty well telegraphed, not least by the interesting use of the credits to flash all the main events coming up in the episode - don't think I've seen anything like that since the Invaders. Still the start is handled well with a Cylon infiltrator getting through security to set off a bomb and what follows is a great piece of television, a court room drama that holds it's own against the Homer episode of LA Law.

But what makes the episode so memorable, and cuts the whole show in a cloth beyond that available to most dramas (science fiction or otherwise) is the sense of the political, both personal and governmental, running in the background. The discovery that cyclons look like humans is not handled through overblown scenes of panic but by a scrum of reporters demanding answers, the betrayals and lies do not lead to gun fights but to one man spending the rest of a long journey to Earth in a brig and the grand conclusion in court is not resolved through a clever piece of evidence but by Adama's arbitrary decision to end it. All through the episode there is the sense of a real community, living, fearing, hating and loving in extreme circumstances not the clean cut staff of Star Fleet but a bunch of haggard, tired survivors trying to piece some kind of reality together.

Despite the trappings of science fiction this is a show that should be compared not to Enterprise but to The West Wing, not to Farscape but to The Sopranos. It manages to highlight the way power can work in a community and how individuals can be sacrificed to ideals, and it's all the better for that.

This is great television with a powerful vision and it's amazing they haven't cancelled it already.

coming up: Just working my way through the last issues of Akira and Transmetropolitan, so expect some comic comments soon, oh and I just got an episode of Stargate: Atlantis so I'll be seeing if it's as bad as the fucking worthless, dickless series that it was spun from.