Good TV

Managed to watch some Battlestar Galactica last night. I’m still in the middle of season two (and my brother gave me West Wing season seven last weekend so I’ve got enough DVDs to last a fair while). Anyway, it was the “Resurrection Ship” two parter (which with “The Pegasus” really makes a three parter).

Wow.

Wow.

Let me see if I can explain. In almost any other SF show the battle between the two battlestars and the two basestars would be at the centre of these episodes. But here it’s a background element. We’re treated to a series of brilliant chararcter moments that build and then destroy and rebuild the plot with a few softly spoken words. This is what all television should be like. The closest comparison I can think of is The Sopranos. It’s really that good.

But minor niggle… (and this applies to much of the Boomer storyline in season one as well) … are CCTV cameras somehow subject to Cylon infiltration and thus distrusted by the Colonials? Otherwise Baltar should be in a lot of trouble.

And a digression: it’s been said by other people that American fiction is obsessed with father-son relationships in a way that British (and European in general) fiction isn’t. And the Adama family saga certainly fits the bill. But look at cop shows. US cop shows are all about more or less equal partners, but UK cop shows are often about an older detective and his younger sidekick (i.e. a substitute father-son relationship) and I can’t think of many US cop series that fit that model and no UK shows based around equal partners. (Oh, and then there’s CSI where Gil is a clear father figure, but does that make his relationship with Sara substitute-incest?). Thinking about it, this may in part reflect the way police forces are organised in the two countries but seeing as how TV rarely cares that much about realism I think there’s something a bit more to it. Am I seeing made up patterns or is there something here?