It's been a while since I've done anything on this site (ok, something like 4 years) but I have a renewed interest in giving other people the benefit of my opinion on subjects they may or may not care about and I may or may not know much about. This post is about one of my past and current interests Battle Star Galactica.

I'm old enough to have remembered the first version of this show, the one that stared Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, and Lorne Greene, and looked a lot like a cheap version of Star Wars (so much so that the producers were actually sued by George Lucas). Since there wasn't any other science fiction (to speak of) on TV at that time (1978), it became a major topic of conversation for sci-fi geeks like myself and my best friend Mike. It was a fun show that featured swashbuckling heroes, real cool space battles, and hot babes in flight suits. All the things that make life worth living for a 19 year old male science fiction fan.

I'm also old enough to remember the 1980 version (Galactica 1980) of the show that is known among old school Battle Star Galactica fans as "The Show Whose Name We Must Not Speak". This half hour version (where they discover Earth, basically to save money) is so bad, most fans have driven it from their consciousness and there is an agreement among them that the show never existed.

I was also aware of the attempts of Richard Hatch to revive the series in the late 1990's with a demo video he used to show at science conventions. I always thought the idea revival by Hatch (who didn't own the rights to BSG) as a bit far fetched. Still, the show had a cult following that I figured someone could exploit.

When the Sci-Fi channel announced it was finally bringing back the show, I was a very happy camper. I couldn't wait to see the mini-series, but once it began, I couldn't wait for it to end. To say I was underwhelmed would be an understatement. For whatever reason (and I still am not sure) the min-series just didn't connect with me. Perhaps it was too different from the original, or perhaps I was too distracted by other things. In any case, the mini-series left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I didn't watch the series that followed for the first few years it was on. That turned out to be a mistake, a big mistake.

I didn't realize what I was missing until I caught the DVD "Battle Star Galactica:Razor". For those who don't know, this is a two part BSG episode that involves Commander Kain and the crew of the Pegasus. The story and performances in this two-parter were riveting and really made me regret missing those first few years of the new series.

Since then, I have tried to catch up and follow the show (now in it's last season and last six episodes) and it has been some amazing television. Edward James Olmos is just incredible as William Adama, and the rest of the cast is terrific too. Olmos fits in well with the grittier and more realistic (as realistic as a show about humans fleeing a race of genocidal robots can be anyway) tone of the show and the drama of the thing really draws you in. Even my wife (who is not a big science fiction fan) is now following the show.

In short, Ron Moore (of Star Trek Deep Space Nine fame) has done an outstanding job of creating an interesting (and very different) version of the show I loved as a 19 year old. BSG isn't just good science fiction, it's also great drama.