What is it? That’s easy — it’s a war story. The main characters are the defenders of the last of humanity, the military crew of the titular spaceship. But there are other places and people too — the civilians that truly make up what is left of the human race, and the enemy who chase them through the stars. It’s an epic, a space opera in the least pejorative sense of the word.

And since it’s written on such a grand scale there is plenty of opportunity to examine the minutiae of life and society — fledgling government, military rule, religion, war propaganda — as well as larger questions of humanity. Like any good science fiction, it provides a safe, removed theatre in which to examine some tricky subjects.

If anyone wants to borrow the complete thing, we have a substantial number of DVDs here. I totally recommend it.

Battlestar Galactica: The Final Season was posted to us when we were on holiday.

I wonder if there’s a way to set up “surprise” orders using an online wishlist? Every month, approximately, the system would order something for you. Obviously you’d need to give it some money. Maybe add a certain amount into an account on a weekly basis, and the system would choose it’s next product and — assuming it didn’t have enough cash on hand — wait until the account was flush enough.

Obviously if you add five pounds to the account every week you’re not going to get anything very expensive and it would spoil the excitement if the system waited 8 months without making a single purchase. So there would have to be some cut-off. I suppose the sensible thing is just not to add stupidly expensive items to the automated wish list.

Anyway, all that’s just prelude because I haven’t much to say about BSG yet. We’ve watched the first disc, episodes 1–4. Spoilers from here on, so bail now if you haven’t watched this far!

The big reveal at the start of the series — that the Earth colony were apparently made up of human-type Cylons, and that the “final four” lived on that Earth two millenia ago. Exciting! But then everyone ignores this. :-(

Felix and Zarek have a little coup, which gets a bit exciting but ultimately leads nowhere good. There’s some mysterious slash marks up the wall of the engine room, like a big space monster was in there earlier. Not sure what that’s about.

It looks like Sam’s about to die, and I don’t think the secret Cylons can resurrect. Well, they wouldn’t be very secret if the resurrection ships had whole rooms full of identical bodies that didn’t match any of the known Cyclons. Ellen Tigh might have been a Cylon, but I don’t think she is the “final Cylon” because she died ages ago. If we’re supposed to believe any prophecy about the final Cylon, it’s that (a) they’re not in the fleet and (b) they know the way to Earth. This fits Starbuck better (with some wrangling around “not in the fleet” meaning “has gone off for a while” rather than “totally unknown to the fleet”). And her story is getting more interesting by the minute. Her Cylon stalker has got totally spooked and run off somewhere cos Starbuck is just too damn weird.

We’ve been warned that things get very sad towards the end. Multiple people have suggested a good drink will be in order (I don’t know if that’s to dull the pain or to commiserate once the series has ended).

It was quite interesting for me because it’s been several years since I was a regular TV watcher. Even then, I was never interested in the soaps or reality TV shows for the most part. (With noted exceptions of the hilarity that TMF would occasionally show during the day. Jessica Simpson really is that absurd.) Reading Screen Burn allowed me to live through the worst of dumbed-down TV broadcasting without actually having to watch it.

Most of the programmes were stuff that I have already seen or was not interested in catching. Except when Charlie Brooker gets very excited about 24 about halfway through the book, then the second season comes around — and then the third! The one I haven’t seen! I actually caught a teeny spoiler for the third season completely by accident. I just glanced at the page and bang the information was in my head.

There were a few shows which got excellent reviews but I had never heard of and seem not to have made a big impact. No second series, no transfer to BBC2 from the hinterlands of BBC4.

But mostly, I just read it for the witty rage that is brought to bear on so much of the tedious television programmes. The kind of stuff that I no longer watch.

I wanted to bring to light the man who plays Dan Hagman in the series, John Tams. He sings the theme song, Over The Hills and Far Away, and incidental songs at regular intervals while the regiment are marching, waiting, sitting by the campfire or burying one of their friends. His aching voice really holds the stories together and makes the viewer feel like they’re there.

John Tams is also, as it turns out, an award-winning folk singer. I stumbled across a compilation of his songs while shopping on Christmas Eve, and it’s been one of the delightful musical discoveries of the season. Have a look for him.

Coverville episode 381, from November 2007, contains a cover of All Along The Watchtower. The host does his very best to drive home the importance of this particular track to the ending of season three of Battlestar Galactica.

But it’s been a long long time since I last heard that track, and it totally escaped me when we got round to watching the season finale. I kept completing lines, thinking “this is funny, why are they all saying Dylan lyrics?”. Even when the song become part of the soundtrack I still didn’t make that leap. I am clearly an idiot.

But aside from that, exciting stuff! Now I really want to dive straight into season four but that would be bad. We should watch Razor first.

As always, spoilers beyond this point.

The middle of this series was pretty slack. Lots of “emotion” episodes, and not much Cylon action to advance the plot. The minor betrayal by the Six when she let Athena leave the Cylon ship with the baby was almost completely ignored. You’d think that would be a major and important event but clearly not quite as important as boxing. The incongruous American influence was really obvious in this series, in some really laughable ways. Who else refers to mixed-sex showering facilities as “co-ed”?! Anyway.

Things started to pick up when the trial loomed. The replacement lawyer was a blast. Turns out it was Badger in a purple jacket and sunglasses! It’s good to get a character that just breezes through everything as if he knew what was going to happen from the outset.

They tell ya, never introduce a godlike cypher to a work of fiction but it is, on occasion, hilarious.

I was a wee bit disappointed in the way they’re taking the Felix/Gaius relationship. I don’t know whether I slept through some important flash point but they really do seem to hate each other. What did Gaius whisper to him in the interrogation room? Why did Felix want to stab him? So it was as much a surprise to me as it was to Gaius Baltar when Felix lied in the witness box.

Starbuck has something happen to her, but we don’t know what. Though I’m perfectly willing to blame the psychic as such people are always trouble. Dwelling on a prophecy is worse than splitting up in order to stay safe. But anyway, she seemingly gets herself killed, in a very mysterious manner.

A random collection of people start hearing strange snatches of tune that they can’t quite make out. At the final moment it leads them a quiet gym room while there’s panic outside, and they come to the conclusion they are all Cylons. Saul Tigh seems to be the quickest on the uptake, and realises that this doesn’t change anything about who he is. The facts of his life get a bit more mysterious though — how could he have fought the Cylons in the first war if the humanoid Cylons weren’t created until after this war ended? The plot thickens…

Tyrol (trying hard not to think Tyrell Corporation here) is also revealed as the parent of a second human-Cylon hybrid child. I think he (and Cally) will take some time to come to terms with the news though. It’s interesting the way this Battlestar series is cleaving closer to the Second Variety plot. There’s another Dick story that I can’t quite pin down about a man who discovers he’s a machine who has ticker-tape running through a spool under a flap in his chest. He spends a great deal of time agonising over his condition and what would happen if he tampered with the tape. This also seems relevant but I can’t quite articulate why.

So while the power goes down across the fleet (interesting…) and the Gang of Four¹ are discovering they’re Cylons, Starbuck appears in the immediate vicinity in a clean, unexploded ship and a bunch of Cylon battleships start bearing down on them. How many of these are connected? Is Starbuck the final Cylon and has she really been to Earth (which still seems a very long way away, according to the galactic zoom at the very end)?

I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that we’ve only got half a series left in the house (after Razor). Maybe we’ll have a big BSG party next year when the DVD comes out, to watch the second half of season four.

So this seems a good time to look at what’s happened already this season. Obviously, major spoiler warning. Don’t look further if you haven’t seen the first 8 episodes of season 3.

I thought Col Tigh’s part in the first few episodes was great. He got to wear a patch over one eye, have a grizzly white beard and lurch about leaning on a spade for support. I bet he loved that part. I wonder how many takes they did where it just descended into piratical farce? Argh! Would ye be a collaborator, matey? Walk the plank ye scurvy Cylon!

I’m beginning to get rather annoyed at the unspecified BDQ. I mean specifically — just how human are the humanoid Cylons? One of the first things they established was that the humanoid Cylons were almost impossible to distinguish from humans, even under a microscope. This doesn’t easily tie in with their ability to download their consciousness on point of death, or being able to directly plug their bodies into computer hardware. If the doctors on board can’t tell the difference between someone with a USB port in their arm and a radio transmitter in their spinal column on one hand and an ordinary human on the other, I seriously have to doubt their knowledge of anatomy.

And then we discover they have some strange immunity problems, which suggests the human DNA they used to construct their bodies doesn’t come from any of the human colonies they know about. They don’t have the immunity to lymphocytic choriomeningitis which all the human colonists have. The biological weaknesses of the “human” Cylons is an interesting story, which makes the best use of War of the Worlds plot that I’ve seen. Certainly far more plausible than Independence Day!

It was revealing but ultimately rather silly to see inside the Cylon ship and see their command procedures. The idea of the sentient ship is well used in science fiction (Star Trek: TNG, Farscape, all Culture novels) and it was interesting how like Minority Report they made the hybrid. But the squabbling idiots in the command room were really something else. If I were a Cylon I’d be embarrassed to show Gaius Baltar that mess. They would have fared much better if they’d just kept all that hidden and make the Cylons seem at least slightly menacing.

I find it really interesting the opinion that many of the humans seem to have regarding the humanoid Cylons. Everyone calls them “toaster ovens”, even though they are indistinguishable from “real” humans. Clearly they need to get some Turing test for humanity: if you can fool an intelligent human observer into believing you’re human, then you’re human. Heh, for all we know the Cylons are human, and totally unrelated to the Centurion mechanoids.

Maybe this whole thing is just a religious war between human factions, only one side has good AI and lots of supporting hardware to compensate for the fact that they’re all clones with no genetic diversity. (This is in fact a plot from Star Trek: TNG though I don’t know the episode. I’m not that sad!) The other side have, to paraphrase Johnny Mnemonic¹, gone really primitive to counter their enemies’ sophistication.

So where was I? The Cylons are human enough that it makes no odds to the pathogens floating around in millennia-old beacons. The colonists should be paying less attention to what the Cylons are and more on what they are trying to do. After a couple of years on the run we still don’t know why they attacked in the first place. Everyone just takes for granted that the other side “are/aren’t human” and so “can’t be trusted” and so it stands to reason that “they” would be so treacherous/deceptive. After a while it becomes tediously like real life…

We watched it on the laptop over wireless, and received full-screen playback for almost the entire episode. The only “loading…” pause was during the opening credits, for which I’ll happily forgive them. The quality was excellent and I was pleasantly surprised that it even works on Linux-based machines, provided you’ve got the latest Flash player.

I’m not sure what I think about the show yet. It was very jarringly edited — open a door into a different room, the person walks into a different building. I have already developed a healthy dislike for the protagonist’s daughter. I hope she will remain merely a spectre for the rest of the show.

Nothing much happened, though they’ve got a good character for the main part. Like Sam Tyler in the previous, Alexandra Drake should be a good person to base a series around.

Musically I have been tied up with Michael Hedges after receiving Beyond Boundaries, a compilation of some fantastic and moving tunes. Hunt it down like your guitar virtuoso life depended on it.

I am looking forward immensely to watching Battlestar Galactica when Helen gets back.

So I ran over to MovieBank and rented the first disc of season two of 24. We’d been warned that it was a bit crap, but really I had no how silly it was going to get. We’ve also been told that it picks up from season three onwards. Can we get confirmation of this?

spoilers coming!

I mean, Kim gets threatened by a mountain lion! And kidnapped/held hostage on several occasions! How does she manage it? Can one person really be so incapable? I must admit to feeling very emotional when Jack had to tell his daughter he was about to die. And George Mason saying goodbye to his son too. It was a series for emotional goodbyes.

It was pretty disappointing that we were able to accurately predict nearly every twist (who didn’t see George Mason hiding out in the plane?). It did allow for some good banter between the two of us, betting at which point they would stop telegraphing the twist and actually execute it. It was also really silly the way that antagonists would be wheeled out one after another — as soon as George disappears, Tony becomes a grumpy boss, then Carrie appears to Tony can be a good guy again. Then division boss Chappelle appears so Carrie fades into the background. Sigh.

So, 24 drinking game would involve imbibing something whenever:

• You hear the CTU ringtone. (Or every time you hear me say “we’ve got those phones at work!”.)
• One character says to another “you have to trust me”.
• One character says to another “give me everything you’ve got on” some person.
• Someone says “what are you talking about?” when given news of a strange situation (“you’re daughter’s been arrested”, “I’m dying of radiation poisoning”).
• The CTU intelligence crew look at each other with suspicion… no, that would be too cruel, that’s all they ever do.

The page on the stereotype of Hollywood atheist is quite interesting. It gets to the core of the “bitter atheist” — you know, the one that used to believe in God but doesn’t any more because his wife died in a car accident? It has this to say of Battlestar Galactica (the new series):

…features two prominent atheist characters, both of them wildly different: Admiral Adama, who views humanity as flawed but inherently good, and ultimately accountable to nobody but themselves for their mistakes in life, and Gaius Baltar, an egocentric technocrat who ultimately comes to consider himself a god.

Interesting summary. I haven’t seen enough BSG to be sure, but I’d always pegged Adama as being on the wishy-washy liberal theism fence. You know, Church of Scotland rather than Church of White Jesus From Texas. They forgot one character though — President’s aide Billy, who died in the very next episode after explicitly saying he was an atheist. But that’s what happens when you enter politics looking about 14 years old…

It is sad that the one atheist character who’s super-intelligent, a media personality, a hit with the ladies and a good-humoured guy also happens to be out of his tiny little mind. But you can’t have everything, right? ;-)

More interesting to ask, why are there so few positive role models of scientists in film and TV? The balanced scientists are as few and far between, and there is a lot of cross-over: the cold, calculated, “logical” scientist who can’t understand/engage with human emotion.