Battlestar Galactica (2004): Miniseries, Part 2

Hi! This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still working my way through the epic reimagined Battlestar Galactica miniseries. It's only got two parts but they're really long parts so I haven't quite finished the first one yet. I mean it's three hours long, so that's basically four regular episodes when you think about it.

Just to make things confusing this article has three parts and you're on part two. (If you want to go back to PART ONE just click the text).

Here's some trivia about the Battlestar Galactica reimagining: it was maybe the most expensive show that Sci Fi (later renamed Syfy) had produced, and it was the third most watched program on the channel. The first half got 3.9 million viewers and the second got 4.5 million, which put it roughly where Star Trek: Enterprise was at the time. For comparison, the original Battlestar Galactica movie, Saga of Star World, got an estimated 65 million viewers back in 1978. But it aired on ABC so it had a bit of an advantage there.

Alright, there will be SPOILERS for BSG '78: Saga of a Star World and this BSG Miniseries that I am currently writing about. I'll not say a thing about what happens next however.

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Previously, on Battlestar Galactica:

The Cylon War ended decades ago and the warship Galactica was about to become a museum, but a devastating surprise attack on the Twelve Colonies has them getting ready to join the fight. The Cylons were able to shut down their fleet's defences thanks to Dr Gaius Baltar giving his girlfriend a peek inside their mainframe and she has just enough time to reveal that she's a machine herself before they're both hit by the blast from one of the thermonuclear weapons exploding across the planet Caprica.

Meanwhile Galactica pilots Boomer and Helo are drifting to Caprica in a damaged Raptor after their entire assault squadron was shut down and wiped out, and Secretary Roslin's ship has been targeted by an incoming missile.

And now, the continuation:

These Cylons seem really determined to kill all humans, as Colonial Heavy 798 is basically just a harmless passenger jet. In space.

Fortunately it's saved moments from destruction when their missing escort fighter returns and gives the missile a more interesting target to home in on. Man, why don't space games ever let you do that! I hate having to shoot down all missiles before they hit the mission critical craft. We never actually learn where Apollo disappeared off to earlier, but I guess he must have been busy blowing up the fighter that fired the missile as there's no sign of it now.

It doesn't seem like Apollo's Viper has any countermeasures to deal with the missile on his tail, and he can't do that thing where you swoop close to a cliff and let it slam into it as he's in the vast empty nothingness of space. Fortunately the laws of physics in the Battlestar universe are working in his favour. Generally space fighters in sci-fi fly like jetfighters, but every now and again a series like Babylon 5 or The Expanse will embrace the advantages of zero gravity and zero friction, allowing ships to change direction while maintaining momentum, and BSG is one of those series. So Apollo's able to flip his Viper 180° to fly backwards and shoot the pursuing missile.

It works, but the blast looks a bit rubbish. Worse, it's close enough to knock out his systems so now he's the one that needs help.

Meanwhile Boomer and Helo have parked their Raptor on Caprica and fixed their fuel leak, but their attention is soon drawn to the danger on the horizon: survivors. There's dozens of people running at them, each carrying whatever they can: suitcases, a trophy, a stack of books. You really learn what a person values most in the world when the world stops and they want to get off. (It never seems to be food or water.)

This scene is similar to the one in the original series where Apollo parks his Viper at Adama's house and an angry crowd comes over the hill. There is one major difference though: Gaius Baltar's in the crowd.

Fortunately Lee's disabled Viper is rescued by Colonial Heavy 798 and Doral meets him in the ship's cargo bay... which has an interesting resemblance to the car deck on a ferry called Queen of Vancouver.

Lee seems fascinated by Chekhov's electric pulse generators, but Doral couldn't be less interested. The guy's still concerned that Roslin's going around taking charge and making the big decisions when she's just the Secretary of Education. So Lee goes up to meet Roslin to determine if he needs to take over, setting up the possibility for some more of that Battlestar drama. It turns out she's doing just fine though and Lee's happy to let her continue, so Doral loses again! Apollo seemed like a real dick when he first arrived but he's becoming more sympathetic over time.

There are currently hundreds of ships stranded in their solar system (I guess the Twelve Colonies are all in one system), and it's Roslin's intention to pick up as many survivors as they can and find somewhere to hide.

Meanwhile the Cylons have finally gotten around to attacking Galactica, which means we get to see a new version of that classic Viper launch tube shot that got repeated like a half dozen times in the first Galactica movie alone. Though this time they come out of the tubes so fast that the camera has trouble keeping them in the frame.

Babylon 5 had already used this kind of 'handheld' CGI shot in episodes like Endgame (1997), Star Wars threw in a couple of surprise snap zooms in Attack of the Clones (2002), and Zoic's own work on Firefly (2002-03) had the camera swinging all over the place, so using shaky cam in a VFX shot was nothing revolutionary by this point. But BSG absolutely commits to it and it suits the series a lot better than it suited the Star Wars prequels.

Starbuck's next up to launch, but there's a problem with her fighter, possibly related to it literally being a museum piece. It's hard to make repairs though when they don't have the spare parts. There's an exciting space battle happening outside but we're stuck inside with Starbuck, sharing her frustration about not being able to get out there until the deck hands get this figured out.

Starbuck finally launches to join the other fighters and it turns out that her Viper Mark II is immune to the weapon that took out their squadron of Mark VII's earlier. It's not immune to their bullets though and she gets her tail clipped... just like Zak in the original series!

The Cylons aren't using missiles against the Vipers this time as it turns out they've chosen a loadout suitable for a much bigger target. The radiological alarm goes off, telling them they're Cylons are carrying nukes, and now Starbuck's the one who has to shoot down the missiles to protect her capital ship. Did I mention how much I hate these missions in games? One missile always slips through...

... and that's what happens here as well.

Galactica takes a hit on the port flight pod, the one without the gift shop, and they don't have any energy shields to protect them from the blast.

ACT FOUR

The ship survives the nuke, but not without consequences. A thruster has been jammed on, leaving them in a very slow spin, and there are lots of red dots on the damage control board right now.

Tigh's been put in command of the damage control units, but they've got a fire spreading and he hesitates when it's time to make a decision. Captain Kelly comes up with a plan, but Tigh finally speaks up with an alternative order: they're going to vent the compartments. Tyrol has a hundred people in that section who need a minute to get out, but Tigh realises that if the fire spreads to the fuel lines they could lose everyone, and that would be worse.

The compartments are vented, a few unfortunate engineers are vented into space, and all the lights on the board go green. I really like it when they build functional props like this.

Yeah, that's not going to make Tyrol happy.

On the plus side, the scene gives us a really close up look at the ship and look how much stuff is on the hull. Even the ribs are covered in greebles! They need to take a lesson from Starfleet and put the hardware on the inside of the hull, where the air is. Well, where the air was anyway.

Over on post-apocalyptic Caprica, Boomer and Helo have been trying to make the crowd come to terms with the fact that they're not here to rescue anyone. Helo even had to shoot the ground to get their attention, demonstrating that their pistols aren't laser guns this time but they definitely have a bit more punch than a modern day pistol.

Boomer finally relents and allows the children to climb inside the Raptor. They can carry three more people so she decides they'll choose them with a lottery, using torn up pages from their flight manual pulled out of a box. That's some clever thinking, assuming they don't need to look anything up on the way back.

By amazing fluke Gaius Baltar doesn't have the winning number... but the person standing next to him does, and she doesn't know where she left her glasses (they're on her head). Baltar's mind starts racing through all the possible ways he can make use of this to get a seat on the Raptor, but fate gives him another free pass when Helo decides to give up his own seat and strand himself on the deadly radioactive ruins of Caprica so that humanity's greatest scientist can live. This is a much better scene than the one in the original series! Though it gets a bit weird when Baltar spots Six in the crowd, wearing a red dress.

Farewell Helo, you were far too selfless and noble for this series anyway. Basically the Anti-Baltar. Though he does get to murder an innocent civilian to get them off the wing when Boomer takes off. They achieved the take-off effect by lifting up a real prop and then painting out the cables, which is cool. If you want the lighting on an effect to look real, you can't beat filming a real object out in the real location.

Over on Colonial Heavy 798, they get the news that the government of the Twelve Colonies has been wiped out. Roslin is pretty far down the list of succession but as far as they can tell she's the highest ranking official left alive, so she gets sworn in as the new President of the Twelve Colonies! She's now the leader of what is left of humanity.

This shot has been deliberately framed to imitate the swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson after the assassination of JFK... which I guess is just how this kind of scene is done in sci-fi as Babylon 5 did the exact same thing. Only Roslin is swearing with her hand on a scroll instead of a Bible.

There was no Roslin in the original series but this inauguration kind of puts her in the position of Sire Uri in Saga of a Star World, who was basically an antagonist. Incidentally, the windows along the wall makes this room look a lot like Uri's room on the Rising Star.

Meanwhile, the Galactica crew are planning to make a faster than light jump to get the ship in orbit of Ragnar, where they'll be able to solve the 'no ammo' problem. Unfortunately this is the first time the ship's made a jump in twenty years; if they mess up the calculations they'll be suffering from a 'jumped inside a star' problem, and that'll end their trip real quick.

This search for supplies is a bit like how the classic Galactica went to a planet in search of fuel and food halfway through the original movie. It's also the kind of thing that people felt they missed out on in Star Trek: Voyager.

But before they can jump Adama gets some news. Turns out that he's gotten a kind of battlefield promotion as well, as he's apparently the most senior officer left alive in the Colonial fleet. He's now the leader of what's left of the military.

With the President of the Twelve Colonies on board, Colonial Heavy 798 now has the call sign Colonial One, and they're busy with rescue operation when they receive a message from Galactica telling all units to regroup at Ragnar. President Roslin sends a message back ordering Galactica to come and help them instead! Which gives Edward James Olmos an opportunity to show off the objectively correct way to deliver the line "Is this a joke?"

Roslin leaves Lee to talk to his dad over the radio, which leads to an awkward conversation where Adama gets mad about his son taking orders from a school teacher. They soon have bigger problems to worry about however, as two Cylon fighters are heading straight to Colonial One!

It's at this point that Roslin kind of proves Adama's concerns right, as she orders them to stay here instead of making an FTL jump to safety, even though they have no possible way of fighting the Cylon fighters or even defending themselves! I really don't understand what she's thinking here. Lee has to do something however, so he goes down to the cargo bay to play with those pulse generators he drew attention to when he arrived.

There's a flash of light and Colonial One disappears from Galactica's sensors. In fact everything disappears from the screen, even the lines on the monitor. That doesn't seem like a good sign!

And that's the end of part 1 of the miniseries. We're left with the possibility that Roslin, Billy, Doral and Lee are all dead, and worse we'll never get to know what Lee was doing with the pulse generators. As cliffhangers go, this one kind of sucks to be honest! It's caused by Roslin making a blatantly terrible decision and we already saw Lee working to resolve it. In fact I'm going to say that this event is the worst thing in the whole miniseries. It's only redeeming feature is that it sets up Adama's reaction when he thinks his son is dead.

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BATTLESTAR GALACTICA MINISERIES - NIGHT TWO

Oh... I forgot about this scene.

Boxey was a regular character in the original series, but not so much in the reimagining. He shows up two or three times more and then after that he mostly exists in deleted scenes before disappearing entirely. Fortunately this also means that we're spared from getting a chimpanzee in a robot dog suit. I still can't believe the original series did that.

Meanwhile, in the back of the Raptor, Gaius Baltar is having hallucinations of a Cylon in a red dress that he's trying to ignore. I mean he's seeing the human-looking Six, not one of the shiny metal ones.

Going to FTL in this universe takes a bit more work than in Star Trek or even Star Wars, as besides the calculations they also have to retract the flight pods into the ship (which is something the original Galactica couldn't do), and Gaeta has to insert the glowing FTL key. Then after that there's a ten second countdown just to build suspense.

For the miniseries they decided to show what the FTL effect looks like on the people on the inside of the ship, and it turns out it looks pretty much the same as when Chief Brody realises there's a shark in Jaws. The camera zooms in at the same time as it's being pulled backwards, with the result that the characters remain in place as the background gets bigger.

Then we get our first look at one of the best, and worst, faster than light effects in science fiction. A lens flare appears near the left of the ship, it moves to the right of the ship, and with a distortion effect the ship is gone. It really works though, mainly because it happens so fast that your brain doesn't have a chance to question anything about what you're seeing. Like ‘why did the initial pulse appear on a landing pod strut'?

They successfully get the Galactica into geosynchronous orbit directly above Ragnar Anchorage and that gets a round of applause from the CIC crew. Though hang on, they made a big deal about retracting the landing bay pods into the ship before the jump, but if you check the GIF they're clearly sticking out again when they disappear into FTL! I don't think that deserves applause.

Meanwhile we discover that Lee and Roslin aren't dead! Though the explanation for why is probably the most cringeworthy piece of technobabble in the episode so far.

He basically just used the hyperdrive to manipulate the energy coils to create an electromagnetic pulse to fool the Cylons into thinking they were destroyed. You know, that's not actually all that bad now that I see it written down. I think I just dislike the fact that they've used a tech solution to get out of the cliffhanger, as it doesn't fit the tone of the series.

Plus they forgot to explain what these things did in part 1. They're just mystery cliffhanger resolution devices.

Galactica's close to Ragnar Anchorage now, but they need to fly through this, uh, ionosphere to get there. That means Gaeta has to call out small changes to their heading which are then carried out by the officer at the helm. I guess they got that thruster repaired then.

What's strange is that we keep hearing that they're orbit, but I don't think we ever get a look at the planet. All we see is this surprisingly colourful storm.

Here's a good shot of Galactica's CIC to show off just how huge the set is compared to the average sci-fi bridge. It's even got a second floor! The crazy thing is though I'm not entirely certain that it's bigger than the original Galactica's command centre; that room was genuinely immense.

Elsewhere in the ship they gather their bodies of the 85 people who died due to Tigh's choice to vent the compartment and Kara says a prayer for Lee, who she believes died on Colonial One. It turns out that she worships the Lords of Kobol, which is interesting considering that Six believes in a single God. Also Tigh said "Jesus!" earlier, but I think that must have been my DVD player's universal translator screwing up for a moment.

And then ship finally arrives at the station with some of the most beautiful docking music I've heard on a sci-fi series, called 'The Storm and the Dead' on the soundtrack. Here, I should give you a YouTube link.

It's just a shame my attempt to stitch together an ultra-widescreen picture of Ragnar station didn't turn out so well. Incidentally, one way that Battlestar Galactica departs from our gritty reality is that its ships have proper artificial gravity, even one as ancient as the Galactica. But Ragnar station has lots of rotating rings and I'm not sure why.

Meanwhile Boomer and the lucky lottery winners on her Raptor have arrived on Colonial One. One of the passengers explains that her husband is an officer in the Colonial fleet which is kind of an in-joke as the actress was Edward James Olmos' wife at the time. There was apparently a cameo by producer David Eick's wife as well, who appeared as Colonel Tigh's wife in a photo earlier.

Boomer realises that Lee's Viper survived combat because it's an obsolete Mark II model with older technology than the Mark VIIs wiped out earlier. I guess her Raptor needs updating too if it's still working.

Roslin meets Baltar and makes him her chief consultant regarding the Cylons, which is the perfect job for him really as he's been sleeping with one. She's also got a job for Boomer: she's to take the Raptor back out, find any surviving ships the Cylons missed and then bring them to this position to form a fleet. So nothing all that important then, just putting in place the premise of the show.

Oh also it turns out that her Raptor has an FTL drive too! It kind of makes me wonder why everyone's been spending hours flying around the system when they could've just jumped to their destination immediately this whole time.

Meanwhile Tyrol runs into a slight problem on Ragnar station: there's an ill looking lunatic on board waving an assault rifle at them. Tyrol decides to solve the situation with a combination of maths and being far too busy for this shit. Basically Tyrol makes the case that there's over 2000 people standing behind him and the trespasser will run out of bullets long before Galactica runs out of crew. So he might as well just put the gun down and go lurk somewhere out of the way.

I'm kind of surprised by how much Tyrol's been showing up in this story. He has a much bigger role than I remembered and we get to see a lot of different sides of him. Apparently the actor Aaron Douglas did a lot of ad-libbing and ended up in more scenes than originally planned, which makes sense. The character's a good fit for the series as it's supposed to be about normal people having very natural sounding conversations.

Well, it's mostly about that. Sometimes it's about the comically self-serving super genius talking to the hallucination of his robot girlfriend. Head Six tries to get him to consider the possibility that she's not just a sexy figment of his imagination. Like maybe she put a chip in his brain! Either way, no one else can see her talking to him, though they'd presumably see him talking to her.

The Head Six gimmick doesn't quite fit with the tone of the rest of the series, but I don't think that's a bad thing, and she does serve a purpose. She gives us hints that there's more going on in the story than we know and provides us with an insight into what Baltar's thinking. Whether she's a figment of his own mind or a being in her own right, she's still giving us a window into his true motives that we wouldn't otherwise get due to him being such a secretive and deceitful bastard.

Also she claims that what she wants most of all is for Baltar to love her, because God is love. Hang on, now that I've got a good shot of the windows I'm going to do a quick comparison.

Battlestar Galactica (1978)

You see what I mean about this place resembling the Rising Star from the original series?

Meanwhile Adama decides to visit Ragnar Station and go chat with the shifty trespasser Tyrol found. Why the highest ranking officer left alive came here personally is a mystery, though maybe he just wanted to stretch his legs. The guy claims to be an arms dealer whose ship is parked out of sight on the other side of the station. He just came here to steal some stuff is all!

Of course because this is Battlestar Galactica, the crew can't even restock on ammunition without a major accident occurring, and Adama and the arms dealer end up sealed inside a passage leading deeper into the station.

Seriously the Cylons had nothing to do with this; someone on the crew just knocked a rack over and a bomb rolled out and exploded. They're damn lucky they weren't all killed. In fact it's kind of weird that they weren't all killed. They need better bombs.

ACT TWO

Adama and the arms dealer survive, but he tells Tyrol to keep loading the ammo onto Galactica instead wasting time cutting them out. They'll find another way back to the ship.

Meanwhile Roslin tours her growing fleet, checking on supplies and determining what needs to be done to keep each ship running. She also finds time to chat with this kid. The girl claims that her parents are going to meet her on the spaceport on Caprica City and then she's going to have chicken pie, which is an interesting thing to mention. The ‘chicken' part I mean, as so far the miniseries has been very vague on its connection to our world. Sure it's got humans in, but so does Star Wars and you won't find any chickens there. Hang on, I need to double check Wookieepedia...

... okay it turns out that Star Wars does have chickens. So I've learned something today.

Anyway Boomer jumps in with the last ship she could find: a fuel refinery vessel, which means they now actually stand a chance of keeping their 60 ship fleet moving for a while. Well, 40 ships really, as 20 of them don't have FTL drives and can't keep up. They'll have to evacuate people onto the faster ships. Incidentally the original series had a fleet of 220 ships.

Suddenly one more ship arrives… a Cylon fighter. They've been made!

The fighter disappears as quickly as it arrives but they have to assume the Cylons are on the way and they also have to assume they don't have time to evacuate the 20 ships. Doral argues against jumping out now however as they'll be leaving thousands of people behind to die. So this is the same choice that Roslin had to make earlier, except with even more lives at stake. The entire human race in fact, minus the crew of Galactica.

There's no reflection here on Roslin's previous decision and how that worked out, but this time she decides to make the opposite choice. They're going to jump to Ragnar immediately to rendezvous with Galactica.

In private Roslin finally reveals to Billy what's really on her mind: the fact that she has a terminal illness. But Billy already knows! She's feeling like she's being selfish, but he lets her off the hook and makes her feel better. Then he tells her that the little girl she met is on one of the ships they're leaving behind. Thanks Billy!

This time the consequence of her choice is that they have to sit and listen to the desperate radio calls from the other ships while they're waiting for their FTL drive to spin up. They can't even tell the others where they're going as they could give that info up to the Cylons. And the scene keeps cutting back to the little girl, just to keep twisting the knife.

But it turns out that they were absolutely right to leave when they did, as they jump away just seconds after the Cylons come in. So they're morally off the hook!

This is maybe the best shot we've gotten of Roslin's fleet, but we're only seeing about a third of it in this shot. Which is incidentally the same amount of ships that will be left behind to die. They're losing the Silent Running ship with all the botanical domes!

And act two ends with one last shot of the little girl playing with her doll as the screen goes to white. That's pretty much also the end of the second hour.

TO BE CONCLUDED IN PART THREE

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COMING SOON

Battlestar Galactica miniseries, more like Battlestar Galactica miseries. Everything's so depressing!

Alright, I'm two hours in now. Only one more to go and then I can get back to writing about Babylon 5 or whatever. Thanks for reading by the way! As a reward for making it this far you get full access to the comment box.