A Scholarly albeit Conservative Take on BSG

Peter Suderman writes about Battlestar... says it's not just for geeks and nerds...

Based on the terminally cheesy late 1970s show of the same name, Battlestar Galactica is the creation of Ronald D. Moore, a former Star Trek scribe best known for his revitalizing work on Deep Space 9. The dark, gritty texture he applied to that show is even more evident on Galactica. Currently in the middle of its second season, the show follows a space fleet containing the last survivors of the human race as they flee a decimated home world in search of the mythical planet Earth. Driven into space by the Cylons, a robotic race of human creation, the survivors fend off attacks from within and without while struggling to create a working, ordered society from the ashes of a destroyed civilization. Problematically, the Cylons, once standard issue mechanical goons, have developed models that pass indistinguishably for human, meaning that enemy sleeper agents strike from within the fleet. Despite its fairly standard science-fiction premise (intelligent robots have an awfully bad habit of turning on their human creators), the show is a stirring portrait of human survival in the wake of tragedy, where even the most mundane challenges come loaded with the threat of species-wide extinction.