Why battlestar galactica is the best

Stacked up against Olmos' Adama, legendary Star Trek captains Kirk and Picard come off as even bigger, unbearable, pompous assess than we might have remembered.

My main nits with Galactica are that it sometimes goes a little over the top in trying to come off as steamy fare for adults, with at least one sex scene per episode, and at other times verges too far toward the soap operatic.

I'm still not convinced of the need for the former but kind of understand the reason for the latter. Indeed, when Galactica becomes a bit melodramatic, that's because it's being true to its core premise. The show ultimately plumbs the relationship between the Cylons and their creators and poses the question: What is it that really makes us human?

The show's answer is that it's our love and our hate, the messiness of our interior lives and our relationships. It's our passion, our virtue, our petty strivings, venality and jealousies. It's our constant wondering about our place in the universe. And ultimately, it's the best sci-fi TV ever and points the way to a whole new breed of sci-fi because creator Moore realizes that it's really not about the gee-whiz aspect of what we can use science to achieve.

Instead, the real game lies in trying to understand what it is about us that changes and what remains immutable as we continue to extend our reach.

Battlestar Galactica is a serial — and a little hard to get into midstream. Here's a hack for only getting the best of BSG. Minor spoilers ahead. How did TV and movies get you through the pandemic? We want to hear from you! Take this quick Inverse survey. There are two answers. A purist would tell you to start with "The Miniseries," which was the three-hour event that launched the show. When you hit up Peacock where Battlestar is streaming for free you'll find that Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries is streaming separately from the main series.

This is mostly a formality, and yet All of it. The thing is, you actually get everything you need to know about The Miniseries when you just start watching the actual show. TLDR : The Cylons are robots, they also have the ability to look like humans, there are only 12 different human "models," the Cylons have destroyed all human planets in this part of the galaxy, and the survivors are fleeing in space in a fleet led by a giant space warship called Galactica.

This isn't a spoiler. You get all of this in the intros to BSG , and if you start with Season 1, Episode 1, "33," your viewing experience will be better. If you're a huge fan, by all means, go back and watch The Miniseries. But if you're trying to get into the show to see why people love it, start with " The short answer to this question is no. If you want to love BSG and keep that love in your heart forever, there's a very real chance you might not want to watch the entire series.

Especially Season 4. Basically, the show is borderline perfect in Season 1. That's only 13 episodes. The cliffhanger at the end of Season 1 "Kobols' Last Gleaming Part 2" is fantastic, so you'll want to start watching Season 2 right away. Which you should totally do. It and Lost launched within a year of each other. The storytelling complexity of these shows ramped up considerably, with deeper and more intricate mythologies for fans to obsess over.

Consequently, these shows were more all over the place, quality-wise, compared with a show like Game of Thrones at its best. Consider the episode I mentioned above, the one where the Cylons attacked every 33 minutes. Instead, the writers came up with the ingenious idea of a Cylon attack arriving every 33 minutes, creating a bunch of frazzled, sleep-deprived humans on the run from an enemy who could exploit their every weakness and frailty. Moore wanted to talk about human frailty and the political strife of the world; with Battlestar , he helmed what is perhaps the best TV show ever made about the tenuous nature of our democracy.

But Moore also saw in their relationship a way to talk about how difficult it is to preserve human rights in times of trial. The series told sci-fi stories that mirrored debates Americans had at the time regarding torture and other human rights abuses during the George W. Bush administration. The Cylons were an enemy that posed an existential threat to humans, but rather than the obviously robotic robots of the original series, they had evolved into humanlike androids who could live among us and carry out acts of war.

Unless they were? Battlestar explored the fuzzy line between humans and Cylons with greater boldness as it went on, in ways that sometimes frustrated fans but that I ate up. It turns out I have a robust appetite for mystical hoo-ha in my science fiction stories. And beyond all of these sociopolitical themes, the show was gloriously silly sci-fi. Some fans would tell you the end of this story was disappointing.