Post originally by GNM at 2004-12-31 22:22:51
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"Now THAT is what I call a good endoresement.

Granted it took a while for Farscape to click, as it wasn't exactly your typical space opera series. Still it was good, so if season one of the new BG is even half as good as that, while being better than the first season of B5..."

I think so. There are maybe 2 eps in the first 9 that didn't click for me so much, but they were still watchable. A couple of notes about the series, which shouldn't spoil anything:

1) The atmosphere of the reimagined setting really comes into full effect in the first episode. I always thought, in the back of my head, that classic Galactica was too upbeat - their whole race , *billions* of their people, had just been wiped out. This kind of thing should hang like a cloud over the characters - and in the new show, it does.

I think it's fairly easy to judge the miniseries, standing alone, as a simple hatchet-job of the concepts and characters of the original. With the series, that becomes more difficult. You get to see and understand what the producers are trying to accomplish, the kind of show they're trying to make, much more clearly.

2) While the show is generally very dark, there *needs* to be some humor or the audience will tune out of what will become opressively grim TV. This didn't really happen in the miniseries, which is wall-to-wall grim, but humor is present, here and there, in the new series. Not in every episode, mind... but keep your eyes on Baltar.

3) I always felt that one of the classic show's great strengths was the underlying mythology - the Lords of Kobol, the Twelve Colonies, the thousand-year war with the Cylons, and the last Battlestar, Galactica, leading a rag-tag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest... for the shining planet known as Earth.

*Ahem* That lobe of my brain responsible for nostalgia digresses.

Anyhow, the miniseries pretty much ditched about 90% of that. But the series does start to rebuild the mythology somewhat. This is still in progress as of episode 9.

4) Richard Hatch makes an appearance in the new series. This should be old news by now. What's surprising is that the guy can *act*. This was not much in evidence in the classic show, where he pretty much played the guy in the white hat all the time.

5) Certain characters, Apollo in particular, come across as whiners in the miniseries. While the new Apollo hasn't really come into his own as of episode 9, he's not much of a whiner anymore. He has to make a couple of tough decisions that help to flesh him out as a character. The episodes each tend to center on a single character, while dealing with other characters as time and story permit. Apollo really hasn't had his episode yet.

6) The best episode, IMO, is No. 1, followed by 2, 3 and 8. The weakest is No. 9, followed by No. 6, which fails to follow through on its implied premise.