So Say We All
Family, Vancouver, Covid ·This GIF came up in one of our Slack channels at work
And it reminded me of how much I loved Battlestar Galactica
As kids in the 80s in Vancouver, we would watch reruns of the original Battlestar Galatica, featuring Dirk Benedict as bad-ass Starbuck, Richard Hatch as Apollo, and Canadian legend Lorne Greene as Commander Adama. It was pretty cheesy; Galactica 1980 even worse.
I never gave much thought to the reimagined series when it came out. How good could it be, given how cheesy the source material was?
How wrong I was.
Cindy and I picked it up after I moved to Toronto and we had a place in the Annex in Toronto. This was the era when you had to watch the show on DVDs rented from Blockbuster. We were so enthralled with it, that we’d finish one disk and I’d have to run out 5 minutes before Blockbuster closed to try to get the next disk (and a pint of Chunky Monkey, too).
We decided on the rewatch for a few reasons; it was on my mind due to the GIF above, Amazon Prime was shoving it down our throats
and we thought the Boy would love it. He did.
A few things stand out:
- It was one of the first series to film in Vancouver, but certainly not the last. After seeing Baltar’s house, I want to move the family back to Lions Bay.
- The reimagined show did a really great job of honouring the previous series without being beholden to it.
- The Galatica looked the same, and they reused the Vipers, but subtly changed a things.
- Names became pilot call signs (“Starbuck”, “Apollo”, “Boomer”, “Athena”)
- The Cylons became human creations, not that of a reptilian space race.
- They reused “cubit”, and “pyramid.”
- They leaned into the sort-of Greek mythos (12 colonies, Caprica for Capricorn, etc) without explaining it beyond the “Lords of Kobol.”
- They also make use of the “Messengers” as actual divine forces, instead of the Seraphs from the original series.
- The creators also reused “frak” conveniently to escape the censors. I didn’t realise this was from the original series.
Finally some of the themes of the show really resonated. At the time, there was intense discussion about allegories to the war on terror and fundamentalism. but what hit home for us (in the time of COVID) was the sense of isolation, loss, and survival within the show. And “it’s not enough to survive. One has to be worthy of surviving.”
In the end (spoilers ahead), humanity has to hold on to hope, to compromise, to love so that they can finally find redemption. That really lands in these dark pandemic times.
So say we all.
Footnote: Favourite Episode
Just love “Exodus” especially part 2 from the battle of New Caprica. The “bucket drop” manoeuvre is just too cool.
