one in five billion

OH! OH YES! OH GOD! OH GOD YES! YES! YES! OH YES! OH! OH! OH! YES! YYYYYEEEEESSSSS!

I don’t know what you’re thinking, but in case you’re wondering, that was me - after watching the first episode of the last season of the best frakkin’ show on television: Battlestar Galactica.

OK, so I didn’t actually say that out loud, but I thought it. Yes, it’s that good.

Battlestar (or BSG to fans), like other great science fiction shows, is primarily a character drama - it just happens to be set in a science fiction setting. This opens up many interesting storytelling possibilities, but they aren’t the focus, the characters. An example of the other side of this storytelling coin would be most episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. While I certainly enjoyed this series, you would often get an episode where: space-time anomaly/future technology of the week causes havoc and the crew need to solve the dilemma and return everything to normal. Lots of opportunities for action, adventure and visual effects, not so much for real drama and character development (with one or two notable exceptions, the Voyager characters were a bit starved in terms of character development). That’s not to say BSG doesn’t have great effects either. The season opener clearly had large wads of cash thrown at the visuals, and it certainly shows - the series has always looked good, but I think this is the best it has ever looked so far.

I hate spoilers, so given that it’s so soon after the episode came out, I’m not going to discuss the plot yet (again for all 4 of my readers who know what I’m even talking about in these posts…), but I thought I might mention a couple of questions (in the vain hope of inspiring some comment discussion) before I finish:

• Who is the fifth and final Cylon? There are a few possibilities in my opinion:
  • Starbuck - almost too obvious. The whole dying and coming back thing, seeing the Eye of Jupiter since childhood, all seem very Cylon but I think there’s something more interesting going on than just Kara being a toaster. Not sure what it is though.
  • Baltar - also somewhat obvious, but feels more right to me than Starbuck. All kinds of drama and irony going on there if he is the last model.
  • Adama - the Admiral not Apollo. Less obvious, but would be somewhat dramatic for the leader of the Colonial forces to turn out to be the big bad for the other side. I guess Roslin could fall into the same basket there too.
• When will they find Earth? I don’t mean ‘in what episode’ (I expect that will be the last or second-last episode). I’m wondering when in time they will find Earth. Earth is the 13th and ‘lost’ colony. We saw a glimpse of Earth in the season 3 finale, but apart from showing the North American continent, you couldn’t really tell much else: were there cities there? There’s been no indication that BSG time is concurrent with our time; that is, what is happening in the series elsewhere in the galaxy is happening right now at a point we call 2008. So when they get to Earth, will it be now, in the past, or in the future? I don’t think that will have much bearing on the story (unless it is in the past, in which case they need to explain why we don’t have BSG-type technology here on Earth), but I’m still very curious to find out.

I’m looking forward to finding out the answers to those (and other) questions - how about you? What? You don’t watch the show? Well you should!