Sunday, February 08, 2015

Battlestar Galactica: Armageddon (S1E1)

by JASmius

Football season is over, alas, and the off-season is a long one.  Even with the Super Bowl landing in February, we're looking at seven interminable months, unless you live in a city with a winning baseball team (which I...well, may this year, but also may not).  But even if you do, I can't do daily baseball posts on a political blog.  And even if I could, I sure wouldn't bother with the National Basketball Association that deprived Seattle of its franchise seven years ago.

So what'll we do on lazy Sunday mornings before second church service for seven months?  Big Bang Theory-esque science fiction geekery, of course!  And I have just the TV series: the remake of Battlestar Galactica.  Why?  Because, unlike almost all remakes of movies and television series, Michel Eick's and Ron Moore's updated take on Glen Larson's "space opera" was actually not just an improvement, but a vast one, on the original, full of gritty reality and dramatic twists and turns and swerves that kept viewers riveted for four seasons over six years.  It was, in a word, awesome.  And that doesn't even include the white-hotness of Grace Park and Tricia Helfer.

The new BG was so awesome that I did what I've always done when such a TV series comes along: write episodic reviews.  Henceforth, until after Labor Day when the NFL returns, I will re-post these episodic reviews in chronological order.  My sincerest wish and hope is that you have as much fun reading them as I did writing them, and beholding the series from which they were inspired.

~  ~  ~



Rating: ***

Written by: Ronald D. Moore
Directed By: Michael Rymer


Let's get the inevitable out of the way right off the bat: this is not your father's Battlestar Galactica. For those of us old enough to remember the classic version (fondly or otherwise), the comparisons between it and the remake are unavoidable, but as a reviewer, it would not be fair of me to allow that bias to color my analysis of the new SciFi Channel series. So let's dispense with it and then we can move on.

Glen Larson's original BG was what many referred to as "space opera." Not in the sense of loud, fat women decked out in horned Viking helmets and garish breast plates, but in the epic scope of the story and the larger than life, almost mythical (and certainly unattainable from the viewer's standpoint) aura that surrounded the core characters.

The premise then was a united humanity, in the form of the Twelve Worlds of Cobol, embroiled in a war against the Cylon Empire that had lasted for a thousand years. It began when the humans intervened to defend a neighboring species from Cylon aggression. The Cylons, not liking this and being, shall we say, mechanical in their thought processes, immediately attacked the Colonies, and the fight was on. Now it's ten centuries later and, just as suddenly as they made war, they abruptly offer an armistice. Suddenly combat-weary, the Colonial leadership eagerly accepts, and lets its brains turn to collective clam sauce by agreeing to bring their entire fleet to the proffered site for the peace negotiations, leaving their homeworlds completely undefended. The only human leader who remains skeptical is, of course, Commander Adama, and when, as he suspected, it turns into an ambush, and the Colonies are overrun and humanity all but annihilated, he takes the Galactica away from the massacre, gathers together the scattered survivors, assembles the "ragtag fugitive fleet," and like a patriarch of Moses-like proportions, leads his people to the Promised Land, a "shining planet…known as Earth." Yet they are stubbornly pursued by the Cylons, who put, oddly enough, a human in charge of the hunt - Count Baltar (played with Snidely Whiplashian panache by the incomparable John Colicos), the man responsible for betraying his own people to genocide. The Cylons themselves are cybernetic organisms, not unlike a really, really early rough draft of the Borg. Their origins and culture and motivations are never really explored. They're just the Bad Guys who, naturally, get their tin-cans handed to them by the Good Guys week in and week out.

There have been many changes since then.

Let's start with Commander Will (don’t call him “Bill”) Adama. Edwards James Olmos is no Lorne Greene. Greene's Adama was tall, powerfully built, regal, like a lion. He appeared to be as much prophet as ship's captain. Olmos is small, quiet, unassuming, rather owlish. His craggy face would be an unlikely one to grace magazine covers. Yet he has the same inner strength that the old Adama possessed.



The new Adama's role, though, is substantially diminished. Greene's version was not just Galactica's CO, but also apparently head-of-state of his planet, Caprica, since he was on the Colonies' governing council, the Quorum of the Twelve (Yes, I'm aware of the Mormon overtones. But if I go off on that tangent, I'll end up with a book no publisher will want instead of a review countless handfuls are slavering to peruse). Olmos' Adama is just a ship's captain, on the brink of retirement.

He also has modern problems. He's divorced. His younger son, Zach, who gets blown away in the original series pilot, has been dead for two years in this version. It tore Adama up inside, but being stoic to the point of constipation, he doesn't display his grief, and consequently is unable to utilize any outlet by which the healing might begin.

His older son, Lee (his call sign is "Apollo"), is just as distraught at Zach's death as he is. But rather than hold the anguish inside, Lee finds an external target: his dad.

If Olmos' Adama is different but equivalent, Apollo (Jamie Bamber) is unrecognizable to those of us who watched the stalwart heroics of Richard Hatch's version. We haven't yet learned the details of the animus that obviously exists between the two men, but it's clear that Apollo is a very weak, selfish individual. Unable to either bottle up or cope with his loss, he had to find a scapegoat, and settled on his father, blaming him for somehow pushing his kid brother into the Service despite Zach's not really being cut out for it, and getting killed as a result. It never seems to occur to him that Adama is already blaming himself, and his eldest son's hostility just makes his own grief that much more agonizing. The confrontation scene after the decommissioning ceremony is quite annoying, as Adama’s yearning for rapprochement is as palpable as it is obvious that he doesn’t know what to say. Equally as clear is Apollo isn't listening and stopped doing so a long time ago, and even seems to be enjoying his dad’s distress in a “Good, he can’t suffer enough for what he did” kind of way.



Indeed, Apollo’s petulant self-absorption is so bad that even hardboiled Starbuck urges him to bury the hatchet, which earns her (yes, her) his ire as well, to which she responds in what has already become an emblematically colorful fashion.

All that would have been fine and good to establish this particular character dynamic. But when Apollo insolently blurted, "You killed him!" (You could just see Adama smoldering and dying simultaneously, but still refusing to let loose his feelings), that, IMO, destroyed the character. It's one thing for Apollo to no longer be heroic, but this version is nothing more than an anal, quasi-sadistic punk. I was disappointed that Adama didn't snap and beat the living hell out of him. If I'm any judge, Apollo's had it coming and then some.

Yes, Starbuck - Kara Thrace, actually (Katee Sackhoff) - is a woman. Gone is Dirk Benedict's loveable rogue, replaced by a hot-headed badass with a chip on her shoulder the size of a diving board. Indeed, so strong is that persona that you really don't even notice all that much that she's no longer a he (not the way you do Number Six - more on her in a bit). Her fistfight with Colonel Tigh is a sight to behold, all the more so because (1) she wins and (2) she knows she's justified in her cockiness because her genius as a pilot will always cover her multitude of sins. And the best part for her is that she knows Tigh knows it as well.



Given that the sexual tension between her and Apollo is thicker than a brick, I have no doubt that the A/S "shipping" has already begun.

Tigh (Michael Hogan) is another deeply flawed figure (He’s also white now, FWIW). Grown old without ever having attained his own command, his marriage (apparently) foundering, this Tigh is a closet lush who lets himself get provoked into an ass-kicking from a woman (even if it is Starbuck). But when the Galactica is hit by a nuclear warhead, setting off fires in the starboard launch pod, he gives the hard order to space nearly a hundred crewmen in order to put out the fires before they can ignite the ship's fuel and blow them all to bits. He pauses before giving that order, to his credit, but he doesn't shrink from it. There's some mettle still there, pickled in all that booze.



Boomer - aka Sharon Valerii (Grace Park - any relation to Linda Park, I wonder?) - is a woman, too. Doesn't matter much, but for the opposite reason from the Starbuck sex change. Herb Jefferson's Boomer never stuck out much, and neither does Boober (sorry, couldn't resist). But there’s a good reason for that, as we shall see.



Then there is the new Baltar (James Callis, who could be Julian Bashir's twin brother if you sawed off Alex Saddig’s legs at the knees). Whereas John Colicos' version was the epitome of pure evil, Gaius Baltar is just as diminished from the original as the rest of the cast. Here he's an elite computer scientist who is all but possessed by overpowering vanity and an insatiable weakness for the pleasures of the flesh. This makes him the perfect target for the new, improved Cylons.



I'm not quite sure what to make of these Cylons. I don't know if it's better or worse that now they are artificial life forms created by humanity and, for equally as "mysterious" reasons, turned against their makers and tried to destroy them in a war of unstated duration. I don't know if it's better or worse that these Cylons abruptly ceased hostilities and departed for parts unknown forty years before and now have returned to finish the job. And their expressed religiosity is a totally anachronistic head-scratcher.

But I do know that Tricia Helfer gives me a monster....well, let's just say the Victoria's Secret model had my undivided attention, and I'm just watching an image on a screen. I don't know how Balter - hell, forget the acting, I don't know how Mr. Callis can be in the same room with her, much less as much intimate contact as he has with her in this pilot, without "having intimate accidents" more or less perpetually.



Number Six infiltrates the Twelve Colonies posing as a defense contractor intent on corporate espionage who needs Baltar, with all his inside contacts and all-around celebrity-derived clout, to get what she wants. As such, it's the perfect cover, and he never suspects a thing. But then, why would he?

Oh, as the nukes are falling all around him she tells him that he really did always know the truth, all the better to stroke his ego (among other things). She spends the whole four hours manipulating him like that (well, that and humping his ample brains out), even after she reveals her identity to him. And though there seems to be one, tiny part of his soul that is horrified by it all, it's disconnected from the rest of him, completely subsumed by his all-too post-modern hedonistic nihilism, the overriding consideration being how whatever happens is going to affect him (His parting words to her at the end: "I'm on nobody's side."). In plain, non-Vulcan English, he’s a weasel. A Frank Burns for the New Millennium. The original Baltar with a nervous tic instead of the “BWA-HA-HA-HA.”

We see this manifested in his first thought after the bombing commences being to call his lawyer; also his conduct when Boomer lands her ship on Caprica for emergency repairs and she and her partner encounter a mob of angry, desperate refugees who all demand passage to wherever it is she's going. When the last "lottery" number called out is 47, and it's held by a blind woman who happens to be standing next to Baltar, you're just positive that he's going to claim to have the number. Instead, he yells out that it belongs to the blind lady, but even that was done out of a paranoid fear that the rest would somehow deduce that Armageddon had fallen because of him. And perhaps also the expectation that he would be taken with them anyway because of who he is - which proved to be the case, with Boomer's partner even choosing to stay behind to make room for him.



Baltar spends all the screen time he isn't slipping it to Number Six with this look of poorly-concealed furtive guilt on his face; the expression of a man who has permanently lost his comfort zone, and is determined to find a new one, no matter what he has to do to get it.

But again, why would he know? The last anybody saw of the Cylons they looked like…well, like the ones in classic BG. In the very opening act a human representative is sent to "Armistice Station," an annual ritual that the Cylons have never attended. Imagine this poor bastard's surprise when somebody not only shows up, but looks like a nympho supermodel and jumps his grizzled old bones just as a barrage of ordnance takes the station apart.

What a way to go, indeed.

Pity the same can't be said for the rest of humanity. Number Six (sounds - and looks - rather like Seven of Nine, doesn't she?), given access to the Colonies' defense nets, sabotages their defenses so thoroughly that only the Galactica and her fighter squadrons are unaffected, and that only because Adama is a technophobe and they're just plain old. Old enough that the ship is being decommissioned and turned into a museum when, back on the Colonies, nukes suddenly start raining down from the sky.

"It's the end of the world as we know it…" but nobody's feeling fine.

In fact, nobody seems to be feeling much of anything. Certainly not the main characters. That's one of the things about this version of BG - far from being "space opera," the presentation seems to bend over backwards to be subdued. There's little in the way of histrionics or scenery-chewing. There's not much music either, other than the occasional haunting background tones, and lone background percussion in action scenes.

The camera work is similarly unique. During the space battle scenes in particular, the perspective darts in and out, shifts abruptly; at times we get a missile's eye view as it retreats from its launching ship or careens toward its target, while at others it's just plain difficult to make out what's happening on screen.

The overall effect is akin to what one often sees in an eyewitness documentary. Or perhaps as if the viewer is not just watching, but is present in the scenes with the cast, capturing these astonishing events on a camcorder. It has a "live" feel to it, like watching a historic event as it unfolds (Think 9/11).

Maybe that helps explain why the cast doesn't emote as much as you might expect. From their perspective, this disaster fell on them without warning, and like being on a runaway roller coaster, they're along for the ride with no idea of where it'll end up or whether any of them will survive. All they can do is dazedly hold on and hope for the best.

When Adama gets word of the attack and the decimation of the fleet (so thorough that overall fleet command falls all the way down to him), his natural, single-minded instinct is to get into the fight. After the aforementioned nuclear attack against Galactica, he orders course set for an arms depot called the Ragkon Anchorage.

Meanwhile, doomsday catches Apollo escorting a civilian passenger liner back to Caprica containing the Secretary of Education, Laura Roslin (two-time Oscar-nominated Mary McDonnell).



You know how they say that sometimes you don't know how much strength you have until you need it? In an early scene, Secretary Roslin is informed that she has breast cancer. So she was already having a crummy day. Now she discovers that not only has civilization been wiped out before humanity even knew what was happening, but that all forty-two people in the presidential line of succession ahead of her, including President Adar, have perished. She, lowly little "school teacher" Laura Roslin, is now the President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.

You know how they also say that tending to the problems of others takes your mind off of your own? This kicks in immediately. The new prez calmly but firmly takes charge of the liner and begins gathering survivors - or, IOW, what Lorne Greene's Adama did in the original.

We see an inkling of Apollo's politics throughout the ep, but none more so than here. He becomes an immediate and enthusiastic supporter of President Roslin, in stark contrast to Adama and Tigh, who balk at being ordered to bring Galactica there to nursemaid refugees instead of to the Ragkon Anchorage to arm themselves to the teeth in order to lead the gallant one-ship jihad against the entire Cylon Whatchimacallit.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As Part I draws to a close, Galactica is able to get a tactical scan of Colonial One just as Cylon fighters come within range. Lacking a functioning viper and with President Roslin foolishly refusing to leave any of the refugees behind, Apollo races against time to save this gaggle of civilians from inbound Cylon nukes - and appears to lose his race, as a huge flash bursts forth from the side of the presidential craft.

Adama, a helpless witness to all this, shouts out, "LEE!!!" in front of the entire bridge as the Cylon warhead impacts. As his crew stands in stunned silence, Adama turns his back on the view screen. Tigh offers moral support, but Adama is inconsolable. He doesn't break down in sobs, or even quietly weep. He doesn't even shed a tear. But Mr. Olmos puts one of the most poignant and moving expressions of sadness on his mug that I've ever seen. In that moment, Adama was not a ship's captain, or a fleet commander; he was a father who had just watched his surviving son perish, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.

Is it any wonder that he wanted to fight back instead of run, even after it was clear to anybody with an ounce of sanity that to do so would be suicide?

Another unpleasant surprise awaits Adama and his crew at the Ragkon Anchorage. As the enlisted personnel, led by Chief Petty Officer Tyrol (Aaron Douglas, who lacks Miles O’Brien’s Irish accent, much less Montgomery Scott’s thick Scottish brogue, but still looks very at home in the part) deploy to begin gathering munitions and supplies, they are confronted by a volatile, disheveled man with a gun named Leobin Conoy (Callum Keith Renny). Tyrol, entirely unphased by this threat, tells him point-blank that unless he thinks he can shoot several thousand people, he should get the bleep out of the way because they’ve got a job to do.

Tyrol is very well cast as what amounts to Galactica’s chief engineer. He’s very loyal to his own crew, as is illustrated when with barely repressed fury he rips Colonel Tigh for his decision to space several dozen of his people to Commander Adama’s face. He appears to lack the gaping character defects and psychological baggage that the rest of the cast possess. Oh, yes, and he’s also banging Boomer.

This is as good a time to make this observation as any, I suppose: when these humans decided to get it on, they act like they’re going to spontaneously combust if they take their time about it. In two early scenes, one between Number Six and Baltar, the other between Tyrol and Boomer, the couples launch into each other, frantically and violently disrobing, groping and grasping with frenzied abandon, smashing their mouths and lips and tongues together. The intercourse must have been like a chorus of jackhammers. I can only hope that no fellatio took place, for reasons I hope I don’t have to elaborate.

For no logical reason, but certainly a plot-driven one, Adama visits the Anchorage and, after one of what he affectionately refers to as “the bullets” is dropped and accidentally armed, he and Conoy are blown through a hatch that conveniently seals shut after them, leaving the two to get to know each other a little better.



Conoy wastes no time in needling Adama, who, for his part, makes no pretense of trusting his involuntary companion. In the meantime, his “allergies” keep getting worse and worse, until he verges on collapse. Adama, never buying the “allergies” dodge, confronts him as being a Cylon, which makes you wonder just how early on he figured it out. His “friend” doesn’t bother trying to deny it, and we get several minutes of mostly empty posturing, as we still don’t know why the Cylons are so hell-bent on wiping out their creators (other than, by way of implicit deduction, that they think “God wants them to.” Tell me that doesn’t sound familiar). We do learn (well, actually, Number Six mentions it to Baltar as the attack is beginning, but it’s reinforced here) that these synthetic humans are networked so that their programming can be transferred to another body when something happens to their current one. It’s also disclosed that there are only twelve of them. Or nine of them now, I guess, since one was snuffed on Armistice Station, Number Six was destroyed in the attack, and Adama’s compadre expired after the obligatory fistfight. I counted them in the final scene and nine is what I came up with, at any rate.

So now the cat is out of the bag. The Cylons appear completely human inside and out. They could be anyone. And a Cylon might not even know that s/he is Cylon instead of human until their programming kicks in, as the ghost of Number Six mentions to Baltar.

It’s an intriguing penance that the famed genius is condemned to serve. Baltar seemingly is being haunted by his (former?) lover. She keeps suddenly appearing out of thin air, on Colonial One, then on the Galactica. At one point she actually reaches into his pants and, well, you know, which looks damned peculiar to everybody else on the bridge since she isn’t really there.



As she explains to him, she implanted him with a computer chip sometime in the two previous years of their affair. Sounds like the ultimate in virtual reality to me, as well as a problem that I wouldn’t mind taking off his hands, at least for a little while. It’s also a condition that looks unlikely to change anytime soon, since, aside from being a towering pyre of sex appeal, Number Six is the only narrative tool we have to provide insight into Cylon motivations.

Toying with him, she reveals a Cylon device planted on the Galactica’s bridge. We never do find out just what its function is, but Baltar, being a genius after all, quickly realizes that there’s a Cylon operative aboard the “last battlestar.” Feeling compelled to try and atone for his gigantic dereliction while at the same time ducking any responsibility for it, he comes up with a solution that delights Number Six in its underhandedness: he frames Aaron Doral (Matthew Bennett), an aide to President Roslin. Since Baltar is the official “Cylon expert,” and his genius is universally acknowledged and unchallenged, he knows he can frame just about anybody, and Doral is an ideal choice.

Despite his anguished protestations, they leave him behind on Ragkon to be dispatched by the Cylons. But when the remaining eight synthoids show up, he gets up and confers with them as if he’s the ninth. Was this just an attempt to fool them, or was he a Cylon after all? Hard to say. But it saved Baltar’s ass, at least for the time being.

The other story track of Part II was President Roslin’s continuing to adjust to her new leadership role, which was made unimaginably more difficult by an agonizing decision that circumstances thrust upon her.

As she’s gathering together the “ragtag fugitive fleet,” she begins to plan the next step, which, summarized, is to get humanity the hell out of that system and try to locate a new home for humanity, its numbers shrunken from billions to a paltry fifty thousand. This leads to a problem: not all of the assembled vessels have FTL capability (i.e. warp drive). Not a big deal, since the passengers on the few sublight ships can be relocated, right?

Wrong. Almost on cue, another incoming Cylon formation shows up on sensors. Now there’s no time for the transfer of personnel. Either they try, most likely fail, and everybody dies, or the FTL ships depart and leave the sublight vessels behind to perish.

Seems like simple choice, doesn’t it? “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” And there really isn’t any other choice that President Roslin could make: she orders the FTL ships to jump to rendezvous with the Galactica. But while the choice was simple, it was far from easy, which was brought home by the little girl that she met in an earlier scene. She was on one of the sublight vessels, and after the FTL ships depart, and the massive volley of nukes is unleashed from the attack Cylons, we see the little girl, sitting there playing with her dolly, very reminiscent of the old Lyndon Johnson campaign commercial, completely unaware of approaching death, until the scene fades to blinding white.

Roslin leans over, her head in her hands, likely lamenting why her cancer couldn’t have been quicker in its work.

One might wonder why such an advanced culture hadn’t cured cancer long ago. Certainly her condition puts a tension on time as far as her leadership of the human survivors, and her new, uncertain working relationship with Commander Adama (though I have no doubt that R/A shipping will also spring up, especially after the “we need to have babies” line was repeated several times).

It didn’t get off to a winning start. Adama made his disdain for Roslin clear before they ever met face to face. In his mind he was going to have his personal war with the Cylons and that was all there was to it. So, when they do meet face to face at Ragkon, he is less than amenable to her dose of reality, to wit, that “The war is over, and we lost.” He retorts that, “The war hasn’t begun yet.” She calls that for what it is: insanity. I didn’t care for her sarcastic questions about Adama plotting a “military coup” (and neither did Adama), but she’s absolutely right. Their priority should indeed be to “have babies.” To run away and never return. To survive in order to relocate and rebuild, and all the while eluding the Cylons that are still intent on finishing them off.

Adama, keeping as always a tight rein on his emotions (the fistfight with the Cylon was the only time he really got to let it loose), excuses himself rather than argue with her (she pulls rank on him anyway). But he quickly realizes that she’s right. Why the sudden about-face? I’m not sure. Maybe it was Apollo’s survival (after a nifty little technomaneuver which saved Colonial One); maybe it was Starbuck’s discovery that the nebula in which Ragkon was embedded was surrounded by a massive Cylon task force; or maybe it was a the reawakened horniness of an old man who hasn’t gotten any in far too long. He did repeat the line about “making babies,” after all. The President had better be more careful about what she wishes for.

Adama hatches a plan to enable the fleet to escape while the Galactica holds off the Cylons. Not a very dramatic or suspenseful climax, but we do get the fairly bombshell admission from Starbuck to Apollo that she was the one who passed Zach in flight school, not Adama, because she was boinking him. Will that sink the A/S shipping in the proverbial starting gates? Are you kidding?

The FTL jump takes humanity’s survivors far into unexplored space. You’d think that 99+% genocide would be enough for the Cylons. But as the surviving nine of the twelve deliberate on Ragkon, they conclude that they must continue pursuit, even if it takes “decades,” because otherwise humanity will regroup and “seek revenge” because it is “in their nature.” IOW, an ostensible defensive premise. But if they hadn’t attacked in the first place, they would have given their makers nothing to avenge, right? Don’t machine entities, even ones designed to mimic humanity, possess a far greater capacity for logic than this? Or does this grow out of the religious angle? I really, really hope the producers flesh this out, and quickly, because while “BWA-HA-HA-HA” may have been sufficient in 1978, in 2005 this viewer, at least, wants a bit more three-dimensionalism in his villains.

Who knows? We might even decide that the Cylons are, after all, the instruments of God’s divine judgment.

One can almost believe it after Adama blatantly BS's his entire crew at the mass funeral ceremony about the “shining planet, known as Earth.” In the original BG Lorne Greene’s Adama believed it with a zealot’s fervor. Here Mr. Olmos’ Adama doesn’t believe a word, but throws it out there anyway in order to give his people hope - or, as he puts it, “It’s not enough to just live; people need something to live for.” President Roslin, to her credit, knows Adama is full of crap and lets him know it afterwards, but acknowledges the rationale behind it. But she correctly observes that when, sooner or later, people find out that he was shoveling with both hands about the legendary “thirteenth colony,” they’ll “never forgive you.”

But, once more, who knows? There just might be an Earth after all. And boy, will they be unpleasantly surprised when they arrive.

And so, safe for the time being, we see the new status quo begin to settle into its new routine. Tigh and Starbuck, not unlike Roslin and Adama, make a tenuous peace. Adama breaks the ice with Apollo by means of a straightforward, wordless, manly-but-yet-paternal hug that reminded me of Admiral Kirk’s embrace of his estranged son, David Marcus, at the end of Star Trek II. Starbuck strips down to her skivvies, shows some serious nipple erection, lights up a stogie that she might make different use of a little bit later, and fantasizes about doing Apollo in a launch tube (Hey, I miss Cassiopeia, alright…?).

And, back on Ragkon, the last member of “the twelve” turns out to bear a striking resemblance to Boomer.

I honestly can’t say if the remake is better or worse than the original. Just that it’s different.

But the game is sufficiently “afoot” that I’ll be tuning in tomorrow night to see if the new can succeed where the old fell short.

Next: “As the ragtag fleet plays cat & mouse with the Cylons, Roslin and Adama face the possibility that one of their ships has been infiltrated by the enemy.”

No comments: