i watched the first two seasons of battlestar galactica this weekend (thanks to a klingon friend of mine who was kind enough to mail me the dvds, yep, good old conventional mail) and i have mixed feelings about it.
i liked it better than andromeda (where every episode is like this: crew member/civilian gets into trouble, kevin sorbo saves him/her through an act of selfless sacrifice - lesson on trust and friendship included) or than the new sg1 (the first two seasons were great, then they ran out of ideas and the show got too shallow for my tastes) and than sg atlantis.
but, it has several flaws, which are too disturbing to overlook. first of all, most of the characters are stereotypical and lack that certain something that make you care for them. a lot of situations are resolved in a very unrealistic, or at least unlikely, fashion. never mind everybody overlooking a revolutionary cancer cure after a terminally ill patient is cured (oh joy, the president is alive, who cares about the others suffering from cancer). the military part is also portrayed in a very unreal manner (one example is fighter pilots being able to fly any ship, even a half organic half machine alien ship, while also being experts in land warfare - i highly doubt that an f-14 pilot could fly a boeing 747 just because it works on the same principle).
another part i 'liked' was when a technician decides to build a spacecraft and someone comes up with the idea to use carbon fiber instead of metal for the airframe, and voila: the first stealth craft is born (but after it is destroyed nobody thinks about coating one of the existing fighters with stealth materials).
there were also some episodes i enjoyed, like "downloaded", when, after having seen the genius doctor being tormented for more than 15 episodes by visions of no 6, almost to the point of nervous breakdown, you finally see number 6 also having visions of a very calm and detached dr baltar (smoking his expensive cigarettes).
bottom line, if you can watch the series without having to pay a dime for it, and you really don't have anything else to do for the weekend, then go for it. otherwise just look for alternate forms of entertainment.
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Heh, I feel that I have to say a few words. First of all, I didn't like Andromeda (although the original ideea of this show was Gene Roddenberry's) or Stargate. Andromeda looked more like a series for children and Stargate I simply didn't find it original. Yet another supersecret military based hidden in a mountain, yet another paralell worlds, yet another wormhoel plot (I got over it in Deep Space Nine). Now, when we have no more Star Trek, Galactica pops in, with another space opera show. I like the shape of galactica, I liked Olmos as commander, Tigh as colonel, but I hate the President, Kara a little bit and Lee for his funny-to-young-face and father's son (come on, it is so obvious he was pushed by his father...). But the cylon plot is a good one (although I don't really know where the producers will take the show in the next season). Bottom line, Galactica is a kind of SF series that I've missed since Star Trek. Yeah, flying a semi-organic alien ship in combat is crap, but what the heck... For the moment, I found it the best SF series in production (we don't have many to choose from...)
And Galactica sometimes has things that only Star Trek had until now: morla dilema and characters acting acording to some priciples. I mean, when they choose to reveal the fact that they cheat the vote, and by doing this, allowing Baltar to became a lousy President, was obviuosly a big practical mistake, but the democratic values won (although we know that the statistics of a small population is a bad one, that's why democracy should only be applied on large groups of persons (nation wide)).
I just sincerily hope they won't screw it from season 3, because they had a pretty nasty ending... (Ronald D. Moore, the producer, was also the producer of many Deep Space Nine seasons).
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