GALACTICA

"Starbuck" has to train new Viper pilots.

This episode is similar to the classic episode "Lost Planet of the Gods." In "Lost Planet of the Gods" the Viper pilots get sick because Boomer and Jolly were careless and didn't go into decontamination like they were supposed to. The went to Apollo's bachelor's party and infected everyone. Starbuck and Apollo had to train the fleet's non-combat pilots to fly Vipers. All of the new trainees were women. The new trainees had to fight in battle against the Cylons even though they weren't fully trained.

In "Act of Contrition," we have a similar setup. There is a party celebarting a pilot's 1000th landing, but there is an accident (because of carelessness) and a piece of ordinance goes off in the landing bay killing 14 Viper pilots and wounding several others. Starbuck is tasked with training the new pilots. One of the new pilots, "Hotdog," engages enemy Cylons even though he isn't prepared. But somehow it's Starbuck who gets hit and ejects from her Viper while tumbling towards a planet.

Perhaps in part II, we will see another theme from the old classic series. The theme where Starbuck or some other Viper pilot gets stranded on a planet.

I was wondering what the heck "Nelson Mandela-like" was supposed to mean. It turns out that one of the colonies was an apartheid colony, but unlike South Africa where whites ruled over blacks, in the BG colony the blacks ruled over the whites.

Once again we see Ronald Moore making the humans bad people. In the original series, humans were generally seen as good.

There was the obvious humor of seeing Richard Hatch playing Tom Zarek lecture Lee Adama about the meaning of his call sign "Apollo." Ha ha.

I wonder what Baltar is going to do with that nuclear warhead?

Sorry it took so long to post this. I wanted to rewatch the original mini-series before starting on the new stuff, so that was six hours of Tivo viewing that I had to catch up on this weekend.

At this point I have no deep commentary to offer. My favorite character remains Baltar, probably because he hallucinates a hot blonde nymphomaniac Cylon. Wow, I think it would be worth it to destroy all of humanity in order to have sex with her.

“33” reminded me of a Star Trek TNG episode where the officers are playing a game of poker, and it gets repeated four times before they finally figure out that they are in a repeating time warp or something like that. There was never any explanation of how the Oceanic was related to the Cylons tracking the fleet after each FTL jump.

In “Water” we see a little more character development. Sharon “Boomer” Valerii who is a Cylon agent who thinks she’s human sabotaged the water tanks and then almost sabotaged the mission to find more water.

Besides the Cylon agent looking like a human arc, the part about the Galactica running out of supplies was a basic theme from the original series; it’s nice to see that at least some of the old plot elements are being recycled.

In the next episodes, I presume we will find out how Baltar is going to be able to convince everyone that he has some kind of chemical test to determine who’s human and who’s Cylon. If you recall from the miniseries, Baltar made up the fact that the one guy was actually a Cylon spy. But in an irony that the viewers discovered and Baltar doesn’t know, he actually was a Cylon spy.

It’s too bad that they have to use names from the old show when the characters have nothing to do with the old show’s characters. Boomer and Starbuck, who are both women, are completely different than the original Boomer and Starbuck. Not to mention that Boomer is a Cylon spy. I wonder if she has super Cylon strength?

The new Battlestar Galactica is missing a real Starbuck, a buddy for Lee “Apollo” Adama to provide a much needed male bonding aspect to the series.

The mini-series from last year will air on the Sci Fi channel on Tues, Jan 11 (part 1) at 9/8C and Wed, Jan 12 (part 2) at 9/8C.

Then the first episode of the new series will air on Fri, Jan 14, at 9/8C.

So make sure to set your Tivo.